More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

Everything seems an echo of something else.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

For the truth is a terrible thing.

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.