More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.

It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.

Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.

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

Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!

I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.