As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things.

Human kind cannot bear much reality.

There is no escape from metre; there is only mastery.

All time is eternal, moving inexorably toward an end which we believe is a result of our actions, but over which our control is mere illusion.

Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.

What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.