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

After Pope, in the beginning of Romanticism, people developed the idea that imagination rather than reason was a special form of knowledge and its best expression is through poetry. Therefore, poetry should not try to do the stuff that mere prose does: convey information or make arguments about ideas.

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?

I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, its their only elective, so this is their one shot. Theyll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.

Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.

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

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.