Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.

Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

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

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

I don't know that I had a sense that there was such a thing as "the poetry world" in the 1960s and early 70s. Maybe poets did, but for me as an onlooker and reader of poetry, poetry felt like it was part of a larger literary world. I mean, even the phrase "the poetry world" reflects a sort of balkanization of American literary and artistic life that has to some extent happened since then.

[Cesar] Vallejo was at least metaphorically killed by fascist forces, in the sense that he wore himself out raising funds for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and got sick and died.