At somewhere around 10 syllables, the English poetic line is at its most relaxed and manageable.

Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.

My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.

Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done.

What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.

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.