A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write.
A word is elegy to what it signifies.
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking.
Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.
Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.
Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.
Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.
Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.
Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.
The Earth forgives the previous year every year.
The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.
We don't know our own story.
What we usually find is that when people think they have a new idea or approach something for the first time, it is actually a recurrence of a line of thinking explored in the past.
Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.
Writing is an incessant process of discovery.
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