The ways we miss our lives are life..

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times..

The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed..

Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so..

Anyone who has read Yeats's wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, su….

there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it..

It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life..

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could….

Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen..

I simply don't want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a ca….

When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in..

A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it..

Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened….

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child..

One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world..

whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best..

Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the ….

We are all so to speak intellectuals about something..

We read our mail and counted up our missions In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school Till our lives wore out;….

The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything I am being sympathetic, not sa….

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks..