I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander.

The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.