As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that… That may be...

Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things.

I’ve had trouble with criticism, I guess. It’s hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I’ve written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it’s understood on television and in newspapers.

I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.

Of course, I like Byron enormously; I’m crazy about Don Juan. And of course Keats and Shelley and I suppose everyone that everyone likes.

As charming as old people are, one doesn’t want to have a 75-year-old baby. One wants to make something new.

I took a course at Harvard with Delmore Schwartz, a writing course, and there were about 30 of us… I don’t really see vast movements full of wonderful poets all over the place.

Also, I liked John Cage’s music. I liked it for its craziness, the use of silence, the boldness-anything to get me away from writing about… I don’t know what academic poets write about.

Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the...

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it’s not.

It’s enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.

I mean, there are excesses all over the place. People are always saying what are the different schools of American poetry.

Some people who write about poetry seem to have had trouble with my poetry because it is sometimes comic. I don’t think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it’s...

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader… I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife...

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one’s own connoisseur.

I thought, ‘There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about...

I’ve written fiction before… I had tried to write stories, almost true stories before, but I never had found a way to do it.

Here I was in my 20s, and life seemed to me so exciting and full of girls and gardens and steamships and drinks and tennis games and countries and cathedrals… I mean, it seemed absurd...

I simply was ignoring the fact that The Waste Land indeed made it seem to many poets that one had to be depressed-not that The Waste Land is a bad poem, it’s a wonderful poem-that...

AESTHETICS OF INTEGRITYFor every star in the skySomeone is holding his ground.

I love painting and music, of course. I don’t know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I’ve certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I...

The subject matter of the stories on the surface… there seem to be a number of stories about travel.

I saw a way that I could write fiction about my own experience and things that I’ve done and imagined. I was very interested to be writing these stories because I found that, like a...

It takes a long time to publish a book.

I suppose that… it’s really hard to tell… I mean, certainly the brightness, the dash, the excitement, the sort of self-confidence of the hand on the canvas-all that was exciting. It’s hard to say how...

I’m a writer who likes to be influenced.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

I think my poetry was very influenced-it seems almost dumb to say it-but it was very influenced by Shakespeare. Very early on I read his plays… and, I don’t know, I started speaking in blank...

It’s not that I was indifferent ot the horrors of war, because that’s what inspired the poem to a large extent, but I couldn’t write about them.

As for political poetry, as it’s usually defined, it seems there’s very little good political poetry.

I also have travelled in Africa, so there are about seven or eight stories about Africa. I’ve also been to China, so there are five or six stories about China, and some about Mexico. I...

I certainly think it’s worth making an effort to write about certain important things, as I made an effort to write about the war.

It’s a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.

I discovered modern poetry I think quite late, when I was 17, through an anthology, a Louis Untermeyer anthology. Of course, I was crazy about modern poetry as soon as I discovered it.

When I was 18 years old I had to go in the Army-it was World War II-and I didn’t write very much at first, but when I was actually in combat in the Philippines I...

Certainly, it seems true enough that there’s a good deal of irony in the world… I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there’s obviously a lot of deception.

It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in.

I certainly have the feeling that I’m the same person even though I’ve changed a great deal.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven’t experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!