The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.

The end of art is peace.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.

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

The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.

No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin.