One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside.

... 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.

I simply adore being alone - I find it a consuming thirst - and when that thirst is slaked, then I am happy.

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.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.