The Very Best Of All

We All Fear Loneliness, Madness, Dying. Shakespeare And Walt Whitman, Leopardi And Hart Crane Will Not Cure Those Fears. And Yet These Poets Bring Us Fire And Light.

I Have Never Believed That The Critic Is The Rival Of The Poet, But I Do Believe That Criticism Is A Genre Of Literature Or It Does Not Exist.

The World Does Not Get To Be A Better Or A Worse Place; It Just Gets More Senescent.

If We Read The Western Canon In Order To Form Our Social, Political, Or Personal Moral Values, I Firmly Believe We Will Become Monsters Of Selfishness And Exploitation.

People Cannot Stand The Saddest Truth I Know About The Very Nature Of Reading And Writing Imaginative Literature, Which Is That Poetry Does Not Teach Us How To Talk To Other People: It Teaches Us How To Talk To Ourselves. What I'm Desperately Trying To Do Is To Get Students To Talk To Themselves As Though They Are Indeed Themselves, And Not Someone Else.