 A teacher is a person who never says anything once. |
| Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time. |
| I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us. |
| We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day. |
| I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early. |
| I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks. |
| I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem. |
| A chronicle is very different from history proper. |
| Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice. |
| When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all. |
| Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around. |
| Language cares. Topics: Short |
| The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case. |
| I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow. |
| When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do. |
| Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose? |
| I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants. |
| For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again. |
| The spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me, so it's fairly even. |
| When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats. |
