The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.

in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there - few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings.

It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.

One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees, crusted with snow, And have been cold a long time, to behold the junipers, shagged with ice, the spruces, rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land, full of the same wind, blowing in the same bare place for the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing herself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.