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

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

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

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

To have guilt you've got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don't feel the guilt you ought to have. And that's what The Firebombing is about.

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.

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