For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.