And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.

I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.

I have been eating poetry.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.