Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.

I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did.

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.

I think that were I in the middle of an obsession to write about, say, sudden oak death in California or my grandchildren or time and memory and how they look when you get to be in your sixties, and I thought, "Well, yes but people are dying every day in Baghdad," I wouldn't feel guilty about not writing about Baghdad if I didn't have any good ideas about how to write about it.

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.