Flowers and plants are silent presences. They nourish every sense except the ear.

each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.

If one is the kind of creature I am and wants to do the kind of writing I want to do, an undisturbed bourgeois existence with no distractions seems in order. A single meeting outside the family upsets one's whole inner web, makes one start off on two-days' thinking and weighing, destroys a delicate balance etc. etc. ... I now have enough friends to last me a lifetime and that is enough. I am going to close the doors and hibernate at least for a couple of years. I am frightfully depressed about my work. It seems to me perfectly mediocre.

Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed

Death does frame a person and somehow it is the good that stays.