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

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

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.

The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did.

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.

One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read liked getting their information in rhyme just as much as in prose. The genre that we would think of as nonfiction often was written in verse in forms like the Georgic when people thought that one of the tasks of poetry was conveying arguments and information in a pleasant way.