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

For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it came from.

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.

Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.

Death's long anabasis.

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

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.