Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.

Dramatic experience is not logical; it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.

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.

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.

Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.

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