I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.

Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

Joe DiMaggio batting sometimes gave the impression, the suggestion that the old rules and dimensions of baseball no longer applied to him, and that the game had at last grown unfairly easy.