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

Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.

I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.

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

Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful...

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