And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock.

A good poem about failure is a success.

I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any - after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?