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

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Perhaps he had to be close in order to keep a reason for the things he did. To make the things he did be themselves Life. And not merely a delightful exercise of technical skill which man had been able to achieve because he, of all the animals, had a fine thumb. Which is nonsense, for whatever you live is Life.

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.

The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

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