Longing, We Say, Because Desire Is Full

It Was One Of The Great Mass Achievements Of American Civilization, And We Did It Because We Thought If You Were Going To Have A Democratic Form Of Government, People Had To Be Able To Read And Understand Complicated Ideas On Their Own.

If You're Going To Get Up To Walt Whitman And Robert Frost And Langston Hughes And Sylvia Plath You've Got To Figure Out How You Put People In Possession Of Their Heritage. To Do That You Have To Talk About How They're Being Taught, And The Imagination Of Community The People Who Are Running Our Government Have.

If You're Imaginatively Responsible To The Place You Live In, You Understand The Watershed.

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.

When I Applied To Stanford, I Applied For Graduate Work In The Phd Program, Not To The Creative Writing Program, Mostly Because Though I Had Some Vague Ambition Of Becoming A Writer And I Was Trying To Write Poems And Essays And Stories, I Didn't Feel Like I Was Far Enough Along To Submit Work To Some Place And Have It Judged.