Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

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.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Anything is beautiful if you say it is.

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

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world

The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.