Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.

Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.

In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.

Among friends one has the privilege of saying nothing; the civility consists in the assumption that one's silence will be civilly understood. I can imagine a small gathering of friends who say nothing all evening: they recoil from saying anything that the others don't want to hear; and their silence would be the subtlest courtesy.

But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

The Spring I seek is in a new face only.