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 fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.