When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.

Lovers have lived so long with giants and elves, they won't believe again in their own size.

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.

You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.

It has been said that a poem should not mean but be. This is not quite accurate. In a poem, as distinct from many other kinds of verbal societies, meaning and being are identical. A poem might be called a pseudo-person. Like a person, it is unique and addresses the reader personally. On the other hand, like a natural being and unlike a historical person, it cannot lie.