The first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse, was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada.

A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.

Prose is in fact the museum where the dead images of verse are preserved. In 'Notes', prose is 'a museum where all the old weapons of poetry kept.

Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.

There is no such thing as an absolute truth to be discovered.

The first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse, was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada.

Language is by its very nature a communal thing.