If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.

Accident is design / And design is accident / In a cloud of unknowing.

Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do ... is to write as little as possible

A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity, there never was a cat of such deceitfulness and sauvity.