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.

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.

That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

History is where tensions were.

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.