In the beginning of the 19th century, maybe forty percent of women and fifty percent of men could produce a signature, which meant that they'd had at least three years of education because it was in third grade that people started penmanship in the 19th century. And of course black people could get killed if they got caught teaching themselves to read in some parts of the country.

Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.

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

Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.

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

The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called "Rusia en 1931." This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and [Cesar] Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist.

[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.