I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the internal.

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.

One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.

Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.