At our age the imagination across the sorry facts lifts us to make roses stand before thorns. Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse— at least, blinded by the light, young love is. But we are older, I to love and you to be loved, we have, no matter how, by our wills survived to keep the jeweled prize always at our finger tips. We will it so and so it is past all accident.

By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.

It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.

My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. ... it filled me with soul satisfying joy.

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

Either I exist or I do not exist, and no amount of pap which I happen to be lapping can dull me to the loss.

Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.