America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!

You, the Spirit of the Settlement! ... Not understand that America is God's crucible, the great melting-pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here, you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries.

...the wonderful poems interpreting with equal magic the romance of strange lands and times, or the modern soul, naked and unashamed, as if clothed in its own complexity; the humorous-tragic questionings of the universe; the delicious travel-pictures and fantasies; the lucid criticisms of art, and politics, and philosophy, informed with malicious wisdom, shimmering with poetry and wit.

I hate French poetry. What measured glitter!

There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly.

A man likes his wife to be just clever enough to appreciate his cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it.

The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.