As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

It is the belief and not the god that counts.

in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.

The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.