Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.

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

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.

A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.

There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.

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.

A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.