A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.

One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits of the American public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Americans read, during …

If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say that they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politician stays unch…

When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it becau…

A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.

Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.