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.

Poetry had in the hands of various people become a place for inconvenient knowledge insofar as it was a place for knowledge at all. But it was a place where you could talk about other kinds of experience than the official version.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

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

[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.

One thing we do know is that mass literacy is a product of the 19th century, at least in English-speaking cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, and the U. S.

I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous.