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

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.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

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

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.

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!