I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain - and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Nature does not complete things. She is chaotic. Man must finish, and he does so by making a garden and building a wall.

Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

My goal in life is to unite my avocation with my vocation, As my two eyes make one in sight.

That day she put our heads together, Fate had her imagination about her, Your head so much concerned with outer, Mine with inner, weather.