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.

The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special skills and are not apt to.

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

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

Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.

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

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.