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.

I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

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

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.