The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobbledstreets silent and the hunched courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction.

An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.

To begin at the beginning: It is a spring moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black.

I do not need any friends. I prefer enemies. They are better company and their feelings towards you are always genuine.

And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.