There is no method except yourself.

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.

A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa. . . . Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both.

Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.

What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.

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