Poetry must be as well written as prose.

The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ’the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.