When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.

If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.

Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.

A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write.

My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.