The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past.

What you want, what you're hanging around in the world waiting for, is for something to occur to you.

I heard someone say he [Carl Sandburg] was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart In that vanished abode there far apart

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.