It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.

I have never, in all my life, been so odious as to regard myself as 'superior' to any living being, human or animal. I just walked alone - as I have always walked alone.

Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.

I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed - it is, indeed, unavoidable.

I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.

As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.