"A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances"

"If you cannot be a poet, be the poem"

"To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears"

"Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative"

"The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise"

"Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them"

"The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion"

"A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom"

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness"

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned"

"History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man"