Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have - by some manner of a leap - encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain.

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith The army of unalterable law.

The old should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself.

If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.

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

We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it.

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.