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

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

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.

Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.

Then you develop a kind of critical sense about what you write. You can tell when something is good, but it would be just as good in somebody else's work too. You want to hold out for those things only you can say.

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

I don’t believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.