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 do not give the honorific name of 'poetry' to the primitive and the unaccomplished.

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

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.

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.

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.

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