The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking

[Osip] Mandelstam, who wasn't a political thinker, loved the idea of the city-state. One of the emblems in his poetry of the politics he imagined, over and against the universalizing politics of [Carl] Marx, was the medieval city of Novgorod, which had in its center a public well where the water was free to everyone. That became for him a figure of justice.

In the beginning of the 19th century, maybe forty percent of women and fifty percent of men could produce a signature, which meant that they'd had at least three years of education because it was in third grade that people started penmanship in the 19th century. And of course black people could get killed if they got caught teaching themselves to read in some parts of the country.

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

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.