Durable, memorable poetry is usually alert to complexity. A really good poem gives you a reason to read it 20 times, because the language in a good p…

- Stephen Burt

In the arts, in places where you're not going to save lives or save species, I think there's no reason to play ball. I can't imagine a serious poet w…

- Stephen Burt

Good poems do a lot of things at once. Often, by doing so, they encourage us to acknowledge mixed and incompatible feelings. Good poems, like good wo…

- Stephen Burt

One chance, One life. Make it or screw it up, it's your choice. Don't wait to long or your time will be up.

- Stephen Burt

Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend.

- Stephen Burt

To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical.

- Stephen Burt

If we recover something like a functioning, well-informed democratic polity - if it hasn't been wrecked for good by the people who are getting in now…

- Stephen Burt

Gunn would be an important figure-rewarding, delightful, accomplished, enduring-in the history of English-language poetry even were his life not as f…

- Stephen Burt

In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of o…

- Stephen Burt