There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.