I have lost faith in universal panaceas - work is the one thing in which I really believe.

The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.

I don't like quintessential certitude.

Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.

... politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.

It is through the acceptance of a variety of aethetic and intellectual points of view that a culture is given breadth and density.

It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life.... [ellipsis in source] Illness, old age, and death--subjects as ancient as humanity--these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.