We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

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

There is no country but the heart.

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

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.