[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.

Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year.

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated-thrown aside-a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.

A poem is a small machine made out of words.

For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.