Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?

[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).

Absolute power corrupts absolutely; and if you surrender your personal responsibility to a government which promises to take care of you, they will only take care of themselves.

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

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.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.