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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.