If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.

The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?'

We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.

When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect.

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.