The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
The imagination is man's power over nature.
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.
I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.