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.

You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.

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.

Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

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

For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is a true thing. Criticism isn’t written for poets, it’s written for other readers. One hopes it is true for other readers if it’s true for oneself.

All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.