Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

My mind may be American but my heart is British.

When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.

At the still point, there the dance is.

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.

Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.

Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.