Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.

It's clear that there has to be some play between the vitality of invention in economic life and some regulation of it, and in some ways the great ideological wars of the 20th century that cost so many lives had to do with whether to have managed economies directed by government or economies directed by the free movement of capital, which is only partially subject to government regulation.

You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean less musical education for the schools and that also mean more overcrowded schools.

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.

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.

You only had widespread literacy and books that people could afford in the middle of the 19th century. Did more people read poetry at the turn of the 20th century when there were about fifty million people?

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.