If You're Imaginatively Responsible To The Place

When I Was In College, I Lost My Scholarship One Year. I Had Enough Money For Tuition, But Not Room And Board. So I Camped In The Hills.

I Think One Percent Of The Population Attended College When Wallace Stevens And Robert Frost And Gertrude Stein Were At Harvard. Now I Think Forty Percent Of Americans Have Some College Education. That's An Astronomical Change.

After Pope, In The Beginning Of Romanticism, People Developed The Idea That Imagination Rather Than Reason Was A Special Form Of Knowledge And Its Best Expression Is Through Poetry. Therefore, Poetry Should Not Try To Do The Stuff That Mere Prose Does: Convey Information Or Make Arguments About Ideas.

It Was One Of The Great Mass Achievements Of American Civilization, And We Did It Because We Thought If You Were Going To Have A Democratic Form Of Government, People Had To Be Able To Read And Understand Complicated Ideas On Their Own.

I Think That Were I In The Middle Of An Obsession To Write About, Say, Sudden Oak Death In California Or My Grandchildren Or Time And Memory And How They Look When You Get To Be In Your Sixties, And I Thought, "well, Yes But People Are Dying Every Day In Baghdad," I Wouldn't Feel Guilty About Not Writing About Baghdad If I Didn't Have Any Good Ideas About How To Write About It.