When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.

How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?

An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.

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

Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

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.

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