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.

I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. Hes very original, very accurate and acute.

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

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.

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

The non-artists among us are always terribly busy, but finally disappear without a trace.