The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.

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.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.