Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.

“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause; then she answered, “By thinking.”

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

... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.

Where music thundered let the mind be still, Where the will triumphed let there be no will, What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.

It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.

a poet never feels useful.