If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.

If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God; take the even, take the odd.

Autumn is the American season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown, and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming. We think this frost-fire is a portent somehow: a promise that the continent has given us. Life, too, we think, is capable of taking fire in this country; of creating beauty never seen.

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off

We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.

See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.