No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.

One writes in order to feel.

In time of crisis, we summon up our strength. Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

My lifetime listens to yours.

Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has - the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge - infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.

Flight is intolerable contradiction.