If we want to have a two-class society and an unemployed, welfare-crippled lower class that has no access to equality and educational opportunity and no access to jobs and is resentful and furiously angry, we can have it - that's what we've been willing to pay for so far.

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.

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

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.

A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write.

One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of your life that doesn't feel like a cartoon, and how the cartoon comes into it.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.