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

True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.

For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

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

Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.

Growing old is, of all things we experience, that which takes the most courage, and at a time when we have the least resources, especially with which to meet frustration.

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