The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.

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

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

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.

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