To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.

The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.