Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.

The gift of independence once granted cannot be lightly taken away again.

Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.

Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age).

You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.