For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) "There is always something." And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge." And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.

Dying--shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)

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

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."

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.