The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

History is all explained by geography.

Everything seems an echo of something else.