What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.

The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.

We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.

Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.

The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.