My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

The critic who doesn't make a personal statement, in remeasurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results. KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That's what the word means.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, Mamma, can I open the light? She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art.