In politics nothing happens by accident. If it happens you can bet it was planned that way.

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow next week next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.

Poetry is something that happens in universities in creative writing programs or in English departments.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass for new things to happen to us we want to hold on to certain moments we don't want our lives to end.