The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.

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

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

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.

The spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me, so it's fairly even.

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.

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.