Even though Helen Vendler wasn't on the Harvard faculty when I came first in 1979, she was a guardian spirit; Robert Fitzgerald gave me the use of his study in Pusey Library. Monroe and Brenda Engel kept open house, Bob and Jana Kiely made me at home in Adams House. Then, too, in 1979, Frank Bidart, whom Id met in Dublin after the death of Robert Lowell he was over seeing Caroline Blackwood Frank brought me into his circle of friends, including Robert Pinsky and Alan Williamson.

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

The end of art is peace.

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

Walk on air against your better judgement.