The woods are lovely, dark, and deep but I have promises to keep...

Yes, and even for the past...that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was. Something I can accept. Mistakes made by the self I had to be or was not able to be.

It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling To get adapted to my kind of fooling.

And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.