Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.

Life is valuable -- when completed by the imagination. And then only.

In the imagination, we are from henceforth (so long as you read) locked in a fraternal embrace, the classic caress of author and reader.

The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.

I will teach you my townspeoplehow to perform a funeralfor you have it over a troopof artists--unless one should scour the world--you have the ground sense necessary.

The poem, to me (until I go broke) is an attempt, an experiment, a failing experiment, toward assertion with broken means but an assertion, always, of a new and total culture, the lifting of an environment to expression. Thus it is social, the poem is a social instrument.