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.

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

One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.

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.

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

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.