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I think Whitman more than any other poet possessed the gift of revealing to others the beauty of everything around us, the beauty of nature, the beauty of human beings.

I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession.

The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

And when I was angry, when I was younger, I was in a cocoon. Now I'm a beautiful, black butterfly.

Metamorphosis has always been the greatest symbol of change for poets and artists. Imagine that you could be a caterpillar one moment and a butterfly the next.

Hmmm. I think a lot of people can write poems that are howls of anguish. I think I've probably written such things and then torn them up.

There's something almost adolescent about Whitman's paean to everything that was and remains good about America.