Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.

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.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.