You watch an old 'Jeopardy!' and the categories alone are very plain. 'Poetry ' or 'Movies ' or 'Physics.' If you watch it now though there'll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes lots more high-concept categories and questions.

A book is sent out into the world and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible Homer Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age and an age is heroic because of what it is not because of what it does.

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry it would be filtered through the lens of race sex and age.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere turning its back on the political realm.

Maybe it is something to do with age but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry in painting and in music.

In the television age the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.