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

A word is elegy to what it signifies.

I think one percent of the population attended college when Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein were at Harvard. Now I think forty percent of Americans have some college education. That's an astronomical change.

The ideal of universal literacy, in the West anyway, was first of all a Protestant idea - that everybody had to be able to read to save their soul. That idea got transposed into an idea of the importance of literacy for democratic citizenship.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

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.

Someone will always want to mobilize Death on a massive scale for economic Domination or revenge. And the task, taken As a task, appeals to the imagination. The military is an engineering profession.