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

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

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.

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.

A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.

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

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