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.

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

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.

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

Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.

The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.

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