You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

Honesty: The ability to resist small temptations.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

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.

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

A savage is simply a human organism that has not received enough news from the human race.

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.