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."

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.

What if angry vectors veer Round your sleeping head, and form. There's never need to fear Violence of the poor world's abstract storm.

I longed to know the world's name.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.