My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.

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

As I started reading about it, I saw that at the beginning of the 19th century, outside of New England - which was an unusually literate place - practically no one could read or write. And even in New England, the overall rate was only about 60 percent. That still means four out of 10 people couldn't put their name to a will.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

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