Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country-it had all been done in our name. . . . The French city . . . had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.

A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval Carmina Burana - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music.

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.