Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.

Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you've watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you.

In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.

Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.