Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets – they’re more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.
Do we always make our freedom out of someone else’s bondage?
It’s extraordinary how little two people can understand each other and how cruel two people who are fond of each other can be to each other – there is practically no cruelty so awful because their power to hurt is so great.
It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.
It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people’s side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.
It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside.
I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry – I am writing a lot.
One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.
In poetry compromise is fatal. In action of any cooperative sort it is inevitable. The thing is to find the balance.
Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you.
I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.
Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech...
For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.
For poetry exists to break through to below the level of reason where the angels and monsters that the amenities keep in the cellar may come out to dance, to rove and roar, growling and singing, to bring life back to the enclosed rooms where too often we are only ’living and partly living.
For me a true poem is on the way when I begin to be haunted, when it seems as if I were being asked an inescapable question by an angel with whom I must wrestle to get at the answer.
Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal – and these balances are shifting all the time.
Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.
My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.
So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.
In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.