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

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

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

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

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.

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.

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.