Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

Justice is the well water of the city of Novgorod, black and sweet.

A word is elegy to what it signifies.

There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.

Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.

Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence. I think that poetry can do that.

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?