Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.

Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen.

I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct.

Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.

Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

Looking, Walking, Being, I look and look. Looking's a way of being: one becomes, sometimes, a pair of eyes walking. Walking wherever looking takes one. The eyes dig and burrow into the world. They touch, fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor. World and the past of it, not only visible present, solid and shadow that looks at one looking. And language? Rhythms of echo and interruption? That's a way of breathing. breathing to sustain looking, walking and looking, through the world, in it.

Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.