“Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested…liberate the imagination.”

“I think books are chiefly responsible for my dogged self-determined efforts to write; books & verisimilitude; I like to describe things.”

“For me, a poem starts when a felicitious phrase springs to mind.”

“I never plan a stanza, words cluster like chromosomes determining the procedure, later, I may influence or thin it.”

“What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.”

“Poetry is: a classifying, a botanizing, a voracity of contemplation, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation in which the actual is a deft benficence.”

“A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.”

“Omissions are not accidents.”

“A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one’s manner of writing might turn one’s work into the donkey that finally found itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest. Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes.”

“Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people.”

“War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.”

“Music should be directed by the ear, poetry by the imagination.”

“There is an inevitable connection between music and poetry.”

“I tend to write in patterned arrangement with rhymes…I try to secure an effect of flowing continuity and the correspondence between verse and music.”

“Whatever it is—poem, play, story, memoir, business letter—it must hold the attention.”

“Poetry I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle,
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it
one discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.”

“If you demand on the other hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.”