 According to Van Wolde the people who lived in the 7th and 8th century BC, when Genesis was created, did not believe that "in the beginning there was nothing". Genesis itself suggests that people at the time imagined primeval waters where sea monsters lived.  "For Wei, poetry was a habit, a mode of autobiography and being. He lived at a time and in a place when, whatever else was going on, educated people wrote poems the way we text or tweet. Wei somewhat dolefully observes his colleagues riding around with satchels full of poems."
 "Early the next morning, he took less than four hours to set down his own famous poem, in which he compared his feelings with those of 'some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken'."
 "Poets stopped invoking the muse centuries ago -- eventually turning instead to caffeine, alcohol and amphetamines -- but painters, musicians, and even choreographers have celebrated their actual female inspirers..."
 "Hughes was in the US when the naturalist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962. With its warnings of doom, it was a book that changed the attitudes of many, and it certainly struck a chord with Hughes."
 "We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise,/And the door stood open at our feast,/When there passed us a woman with the West in her eyes,/And a man with his back to the East."
 "Snyder and Killion both know Tamalpais' rich history and eccentric characters, such as the 19th century German immigrants who once hiked the Alps, and wanted a California mountain to climb."
 It is one of the greatest poems in all of English literature...It is also one of the most resourceful summaries of the sensibility of the Middle Ages, as rich and as complex as..."
 "...weaves together the personal and the political, the public and the private, the domestic and the global. For Neruda, poetry meant much more than the expression of emotion and personality."
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 "Our perhaps forgivable tendency to group the Romantic tribe of early 19th-century poets under a single collective title is a disservice both to history and to literature..."  I watched the Moon around the House / Until upon a Pane / She stopped a Traveller's privilege for Rest / And there upon / I gazed as at a stranger  "Johnson knew that there were good reasons why 'a man writes much better than he lives'. In the Lives of the Poets he looks back down more than a century of English poetry, but he is also looking back through his own 'life of writing', ruefully cataloguing the occupational self-delusions of authors."  "The elderly Renoir lived nearby at Cagnes-sur-Mer, and most of modernist France soon followed: Bonnard bought a house at Le Cannet in 1926 and, in old age, Picasso, L้ger, Chagall lined up, each with a new young wife, in rival villas along the coast."  "Stevens stands simultaneously among the most worldly and the most otherworldly of American poets, and it is paradoxically through his otherworldliness--through poems whose plain-spoken diction feels spooky--that his respect for the actual world is registered."  "Inscribed on a stone there are Yeats' lines: 'I the poet William Yeats/ With old mill boards and sea green slates,/ And smithy work from the Gort forge/ Restored this tower for my wife George.'"  The essence of wisdom is silence. If a word is worth a sela, silence is worth two. When I speak I regret, and if I do not speak I am not regretful.
 In the cabin behind his house, Harrison writes every day, longhand, no computer. He's always at work on a novel, which begins, for him, with a particular character whose story...  "He was born into a barely literate, impoverished peasant family of farm laborers in the village of Helpston, Northamptonshire. His random schooling, interrupted at harvest times, fully ended at age 12."
 "At the pinnacle of his profession, in 1935 when he was just 53, Pablo Picasso stopped painting. Instead, he wrote hundreds of poems in French and Spanish..."
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