What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

I’m alone with the ghost of the swamp, somewhere near the weeping willows.

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.