The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.

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.

...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.