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.

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

Humankind can't stand too much reality.

Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow.

If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby 'it.'

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is incarnation. Here the impossible union of spheres of existence is actual. Here the past and future are conquered and reconciled.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.