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

The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.

Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing.

It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.

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

The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.

The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.