If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help..

We always tend to distrust geniuses about genius, as if what they say didn't arouse much empathy in us, or as if we were waiting till some more relia….

If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, an….

You give me the feeling that the universe Was made by something more than human For something less than human. But I identify myself, as always, With….

If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that ….

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry..

If wishes were stories, beggars would read..

When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accep….

Robert Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even - "at least not systemati….

Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice abo….

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad..

There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden's early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that….

our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong..

Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few..

I shook myself; I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class's teacher, when the class got to Evangeline , kept echoing in my….

If my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to helplessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even ….

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poe….

Art is long, and critics are the insects of a day..

The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disap….

I don't need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost's observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he ….

How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?.