Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.