You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

I don't miss teaching. I'm learning to take my time for myself.

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

When I was teaching, I gave a lot of my mind and anxiety to it. There was always something clenched and anxious in me until the classes were over.

Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.

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.

Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.