If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.

I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?

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.

Exchange is creation.

Try to live as if there were a God

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.