Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.
The sea is always the same: and yet the sea always changes.
Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.
I have often wondered what it is an old building can do to you when you happen to know a little about things that went on long ago in that building.
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
We read Robert Browning’s poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget.
I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural.
Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.
Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky – or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.
Yesterday is done. Tomorrow never comes. Today is here. If you don’t know what to do, sit still and listen. You may hear something. Nobody knows.
Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.
The peace of great books be for you, Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages, Bleach of the light of years held in leather.
Be careful with your words, once they are said, they can only be forgiven, not forgotten.
An ambition is a little creeper that creeps and creeps in your heart night and day, singing a little song, “Come and find me, come and find me.”
Come on, you Do you want to live forever?
A tree is best measured when it is down – and so it is with people.
Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.
Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.
Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.