Quote collection
113 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love."
"It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir."
"Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home."
"The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you."
"Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself."
"God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure."
"There is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it."
"The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine."
"Allow ourselves to do as Ram Dass said in his delicious phrase "Be Here Now." If you are here now you cannot fall into falsely constructed gender projections."
"Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense."
"In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping."
"The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year."
"Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot."
"The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary."
"Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come."
"My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet."
"Even though Helen Vendler wasn't on the Harvard faculty when I came first in 1979, she was a guardian spirit; Robert Fitzgerald gave me the use of his study in Pusey Library. Monroe and Brenda Engel kept open house, Bob and Jana Kiely made me at home in Adams House. Then, too, in 1979, Frank Bidart, whom Id met in Dublin after the death of Robert Lowell he was over seeing Caroline Blackwood Frank brought me into his circle of friends, including Robert Pinsky and Alan Williamson."
"Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed."
"Publication is rather like pushing the boat out; then the boat/book turns into a melting ice floe and you have to conjure a second boat which again turns into a melting floe under your feet. All the stepping stones that you conjure disappear under the water behind you."
"I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job"