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

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special skills and are not apt to.

I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction.

I think that my responsibility to my art is to try to get it right or to push the boundaries of what I'm able to do in any way.

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