American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict....We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; at another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare

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

There has been in our time a lack of reliance on language and a lack of experimentation which are frightening to anyone who sees them as symptoms. We know the phenomenon of stage-fright: it holds the player shivering, incapable of speech or action. Perhaps there is an audience-fright which the play can feel, which leaves him with these incapacities.

Try to live as if there were a God

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

Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires.

However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.