The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.

Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world.

What a view, i said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.

Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.

So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it.

We've always had a tradition in America of hounding our artists to death. Look at the list of our great artists, you see a continual history of defeat, frustration, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction. The best poets of my generation are all suicides.

A poet trains himself to stand out in a storm and be struck by lightning. If he is lucky enough to be struck six times, he becomes immortal. Randall Jarrell said it and he's right.