The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.

Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.

Words seem like drops of water in a stream that has its own wholeness and its own motion.

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.