When they shall paint our sockets gray And light us like a stinking fuse, Remember that we once could say, Yesterday we had a world to lose.

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.

Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.

You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin.

To conquer a piece of earth and make it as beautiful as one can dream of it being: That is art, too. A man cannot be separated from the earth. I come out of the garden every day feeling, oh, inspired in a way that one needs in order to convert the daily-ness of the life into something greater than that little life itself.

In a murderous time/the heart breaks and breaks/and lives by breaking.

Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits; they do not come to coo.