The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he’s nothing if he doesn’t make out a case.
When you write it doesn’t occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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.
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 unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.
Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals.
History is where tensions were.
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.
Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
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 burst of something wonderful.
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.
The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn’t give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely; and if you surrender your personal responsibility to a government which promises to take care of you, they will only take care of themselves.
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 had to die. The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, And a child I slept.
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve never read a political poem that’s accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Poetry is a means of seeing invisible things and saying unspeakable things about them.