Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.

All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall, And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.

I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.

Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.

God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.

Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.