As poetry is the highest speech of man, it can not only accept and contain, but in the end express best everything in the world, or in himself, that he discovers. It will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know. This has always been, and always will be, poetry's office.

Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.

He whose first emotion, on the view of an excellent work, is to undervalue or depreciate it, will never have one of his own to show.

I think we've come to a kind of splinter period in poetry. These tiny little bright fragments of observation - and not produced under sufficient pressure - some of it's very skillful, but I don't think there's anywhere a discernible major poet in the process of emerging; or if he is, I ain't seen him.

Death is never an ending, death is a change; Death is beautiful, for death is strange; Death is one dream out of another flowing.

[At a musical concert:] . . . the music's pure algebra of enchantment.

I love you, what star do you live on?