To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.

Spontaneous is what you get after the seventeenth draft.

The classroom should be an entrance into the world, not an escape from it.

Conviction is possible only in a world more primitive than ours can be perceived to be. A man can achieve a simply gnomic conviction only by ignoring the radical describers of his environment, or by hating them, as convinced men have hated, say, Darwin and Freud, as agents of some devil.

Intelligence recognizes what has happened. Genius recognizes what will happen.

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

Written by a sponge dipped in warm milk and sprinkled with sugar.