The hurt is not enough: I long for weight and strength. To feel the earth as rough to all my length

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.

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.

There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.

What makes a nation in the beginning is a good piece of geography.

The beauty of enmity is insecurity; the beauty of friendship is in security.