Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.