A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

The past is no longer yours; the future is not yet in your power. You have only the present wherein to do good.

I don't really think it will make much difference to me when I'm dead whether I'm read or not . . . just as whether I'm dead or not won't mean much to me when I'm dead.

I have been eating poetry.

In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.

I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.

There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.

Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.

It's very hard to write humor.

We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.