The poet is the priest of the invisible.

It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.

The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

I was the world in which I walked.