Poetry is usually considered the most local of all the arts. Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, can be enjoyed by all who see or hear. But language, especially the language of poetry, is a different matter. Poetry, it might seem, separates peoples instead of uniting them.

But on the other hand we must remember, that while ( Read more... )

Ladies and Gentlemen: There are five hundred reasons why I began to write for children, but to save time I will mention only ten of them.
Number 1) Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about the critics.
Number 2) Children don't read to find their identity.
Number 3) They don't read to free themselves of guilt, to ( Read more... )

"Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day ( Read more... )

      I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will ( Read more... )