There have been as many varieties of socialists as there are wild birds that fly in the woods and sometimes go up and on through the clouds.

For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart...

Infancy is what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity.

I mean to say, this is the book and I really loathe it and I can't imagine what a nice Jewish boy like me ever, how I ever got into this dreadful trade.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

Reform and exchange in English poetry are as slow as in the British constitution itself.

America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of...

Personally, I do not believe that we shall have greater armaments in the future than we have had in the past. On the contrary, I believe there will be a gradual diminution in this respect.

History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'

There are but two places where all go after death, white and black, rich and poor; those places are Heaven and Hell. Heaven is a place made for those, who are born again, and who love God, and it is a...

Once you have a disease like cancer, you look at life a bit differently. Some things that were important no longer seem as important as they were.

I dream of you to wake; would that I might Dream of you and not wake but slumber on.

Most people who write and publish poetry teach or do something else.

None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than...

One of the important things about familiar form and metricality is that it draws attention to the physical nature of language: the spell-binding nature of it and the ceremony of articulation.

I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares...

That's kind of the challenging thing about writing an inaugural poem. You're speaking to everyone, but you don't also want to speak for everyone.

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience).

Hate and mistrust are the children of blindness.

He who goes step by step always finds himself level with a step.

Jupiter from on high smiles at the perjuries of lovers.

As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical.

If I decide to be indecisive, that's my decision.

However, intention needn't enter in, and if a reader sees things in a religious way, and the work is dogmatically acceptable, then I don't see why it should not be interpreted in that way, as well as...

Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.

It is the glory and good of Art, That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.

Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.

God did not need any assistance, but man did; bitterly he wanted it, and the giving of such assistance was the proper business of a woman.