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.

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.

Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are 10,000 poets, and maybe there are two Republicans among them.

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

What Simone Weil said politics has meant all along, which means that you fight for 11 percent, 12 percent, 13 percent, that you avoid golden-age thinking and romantic melancholy and you just keep pushing.

Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are.