"A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all"

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

"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"

"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 second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic"

"A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have"

"What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude"

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned"

"No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem"