Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.

Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green.

Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.

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

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.

Write whatever you like!

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.