History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

Never being, but always at the edge of Being.

If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.

One of my great surprises when I was in America was about twenty-five years ago in Harvard, hearing Randall Jarrell deliver a bitter attack on the way poets were neglected. Yet there were about two thousand people present, and he was being paid five hundred dollars for delivering this attack.

Never allow gradually the traffic to smother with noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Poetry cannot take sides except with life.

An English poet writes, I think, just for people who are interested in poetry. An American poet writes, and feels that everyone ought to appreciate this. Then he has a deep sense of grievance . . .