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

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

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.

I once had the nerve to ask Picasso the question, 'What is art?' He answered, 'Art is a lie which makes us see the truth.

What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe

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

I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.