"There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry"

"It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms"

"If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?"

"They say women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men"

"Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance"

"Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas"

"We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution"

"We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry"

"Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going"

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money"

"Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate"