Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated.

Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated.

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.