Till I, high in the tower of my time Among familiar ruins, began to cry For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, Because all died, because I h….

Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part….

Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants..

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible genera….

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it..

I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones..

A teacher is a person who never says anything once..

Writing is like the relationship with your bowels. First you can, then you can't. Finally, you must. Only then should you reach for the paper..

History is where tensions were..

Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first bu….

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..

We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander..

When in still air and still in summertime A leaf has had enough of this, it seems To make up its mind to go; fine as a sage Its drifting in det….

The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me..

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats..

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 h….

That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnot….

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..

When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do..

When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had..