Longing, We Say, Because Desire Is Full

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.

If We Want To Have A Two-class Society And An Unemployed, Welfare-crippled Lower Class That Has No Access To Equality And Educational Opportunity And No Access To Jobs And Is Resentful And Furiously Angry, We Can Have It - That's What We've Been Willing To Pay For So Far.

Poetry Is A Man Arguing With Himself; Rhetoric Is A Man Arguing With Others.

There's A Good Deal In Pound's And Eliot's Poetry That Stood Up Even Though Their Politics Were Deplorable. Or Pound's Very Deplorable, Eliot's Kind Of Deplorable.

If You're Going To Get Up To Walt Whitman And Robert Frost And Langston Hughes And Sylvia Plath You've Got To Figure Out How You Put People In Possession Of Their Heritage. To Do That You Have To Talk About How They're Being Taught, And The Imagination Of Community The People Who Are Running Our Government Have.