Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow`s speed.
[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
A chronicle is very different from history proper.
I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.
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.
Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.
When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.
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 generalities which we couldn't live without.
Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?
The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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.
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.
I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
