quotes from classic

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

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An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.

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You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.

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Other people have noticed more of an evolution than I have and so I'll try to tell you where I'm coming from and also relate it to what I think other people perceive.

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I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

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I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

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Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

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I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

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My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don't have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that's terrific.

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High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.

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American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

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Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.

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I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

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Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do.

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I am not political as a person.

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From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

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Sometimes the archaism of the language when it's spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today.

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I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.

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But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

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But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

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