The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.
The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.
It is the belief and not the god that counts.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.