With a poem you can say 'I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.'

And all shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ By the purification of the motive/ In the ground of our beseeching

Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self.

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea.

The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions.

Anecdote: It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state.

I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.