Philosophy is antipoetic. Philosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage. Unless, for a start, he has a strong personal rhythm to vary his metrics, he is nothing. Poets mistrust philosophy. They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of a head loses his personal identify and becomes a number in some government scheme: if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of majority voting, which smothers personal views.

No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.

There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors.

A banker warned the British poet Robert Graves that one could not grow rich writing poetry. He replied that if there was no money in poetry, there was certainly no poetry in money, and so it was all even.

I was last in Rome in AD 540 when it was full of Goths and their heavy horses. It has changed a great deal since then.