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.

I think that what art can do is refresh our sense of justice, wake us up to what we've taken for granted in the political realm, as in the other realms.

If you're going to get up to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath you've got to figure out how you put people in possession of their heritage. To do that you have to talk about how they're being taught, and the imagination of community the people who are running our government have.

There's a good deal in Pound's and Eliot's poetry that stood up even though their politics were deplorable. Or Pound's very deplorable, Eliot's kind of deplorable.

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.