Whether one becomes famous or not, you have to be reminded of people like Melville, who for the last thirty years of his life was completely unknown. He worked in a customs house and walked off to work as an anonymous person in this American culture.

If you're not happy, if you're not Emmersonianly happy and think everything's going to get better, then you're just sort of a dark animal.

Someone said, in a simplistic way maybe, that all American poetry is either cooked or raw, and if it's cooked, it comes from Poe.

When you are out of favor, so to speak, it's not just the reviewers. It's the editors, the publishers, they don't want you anymore, you're just gone and you've been written out of history as effectively as the old Stalinists would write someone else out, take their photograph out of a book.