If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.

When I first heard Wallace Stevens voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series.

If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.

I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world.