We must breathe time as fishes breathe water..

Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown..

Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock..

The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reade….

Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon..

The world is not with us enough. O taste and see..

A poet articulating the dreads and horrors of our time is necessary in order to make readers understand what is happening, really understand it, not ….

Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen..

But we have only begun to love the earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life. How could we tire of hope?-so much is in bud..

We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too..

Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering..

You have come to the shore. There are no instructions..

Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it..

I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer..

In the dark I rest, unready for the light which dawns day after day, eager to be shared. Black silk, shelter me. I need more of the night before I op….

What I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can..

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer..

There is no savor more sweet, more salt than to be glad to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am..

I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And th….

One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in….

Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its ant….