New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.

Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.

All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.