Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.

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.

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

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