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

I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

Shakespeare is universal.

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.

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.