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.

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

In poetry compromise is fatal. In action of any cooperative sort it is inevitable. The thing is to find the balance.

I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.

For poetry exists to break through to below the level of reason where the angels and monsters that the amenities keep in the cellar may come out to dance, to rove and roar, growling and singing, to bring life back to the enclosed rooms where too often we are only 'living and partly living.

I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.