A poem should not mean but be.

Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.

You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.

The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.

What you really have to know is one: yourself. And the only way you can know that one is in the mirror of the others. And the only way you can see into the mirror of the others is by love or its opposite—by profound emotion. Certainly not by curiosity—by dancing around asking, looking, making notes. You have to live relationships to know.

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

The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.