Once you figure out something about the watershed, you'll find out where the schools are going to hell, and the kids aren't learning, and there is no money. Social issues, class issues, and environmental issues were all connected.

Like everyone else, I was at least peripherally involved in the antiwar movement. You woke up every morning feeling tormented about what was going on in Vietnam. It seemed to a lot of us like a catastrophe from the very beginning, inflicting immense and needless suffering on not only the American soldiers but on a lot of innocent peasants who were caught in a Cold War proxy battle - two million Vietnamese died during those years, and you woke up every morning knowing that that was going on.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Reading is a gymnasium for the imagination where people can work out, get ready for the shocks of existence. [...] For me, the intimate teachers have not only taught me how to make things, they have represented some qualities of mind and mindfulness that I would like to have.

When Emily Dickinson's poems were published in the 1890s, they were a best-seller; the first book of her poems went through eleven editions of a print run of about 400. So the first print run out of Boston for a first book of poems was 400 for a country that had fifty million people in it. Now a first print run for a first book is maybe 2,000? So that's a five-time increase in the expectation of readership. Probably the audience is almost exactly the same size as it was in 1900, if you just took that one example.

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.