The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

If you want it you must obtain it by great labor.

Each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.

The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.

We have all our private terrors, our particular shadows, our secret fears. We are afraid in a fear which we cannot face, which none understands, and our hearts are torn from us, our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion, ourselves the last.