Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.

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.

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.

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.

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

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