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.

Things go away to return, brightened for the passage

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values

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

Only silence perfects silence.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

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.