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 thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

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.

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

What Simone Weil said politics has meant all along, which means that you fight for 11 percent, 12 percent, 13 percent, that you avoid golden-age thinking and romantic melancholy and you just keep pushing.

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.