The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.

Love is a universal migraine. A bright stain on the vision, Blotting out reason.

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.

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.

What we now call "finance" is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.

If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.