Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.

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.

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

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

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