Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.

The question that he frames in all but words is what to make of a diminished thing.

A champion of the workingman has never been known to die of overwork.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be.

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.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

There is absolutely no reason for being rushed along with the rush. Everybody should be free to go slow.