As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living.

If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.

So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit When I left my body on a distant shore.

It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value - a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity.

Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do ... is to write as little as possible

We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.