There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where's one?

When she read just now to James, 'and there were numbers of soldiers with kettledrums and trumpets,' and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow up, and lose all that?

That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.

The way to write well is to live intensely.

Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

Consolation for those moments when you can't tell whether you're the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.