Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.

For of course one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?

Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

It is the place of renewal and of safety, where for a little while there will be no harm or attack and, while every sense is nourished, the soul rests.

For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation