“A poem should not meanBut be.”

“Ars PoeticaA poem should be palpable and muteAs a globed fruit,DumbAs old medallions to the thumb,Silent as the sleeve-worn stoneOf casement ledges where the moss has grown—A poem should be wordlessAs the flight of birds.A poem should be motionless in timeAs the moon climbs,Leaving, as the moon releasesTwig by twig the night-entangled trees,Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,Memory by memory the mind—A poem should be motionless in timeAs the moon climbs.A poem should be equal to:Not true.For all the history of griefAn empty doorway and a maple leaf.For loveThe leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—A poem should not meanBut be.”

“What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.”

“If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements of sight and their sounds as prisms. And to see means to see something worth all the agony of learning how to see.”

“The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.”

“A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off”

“Man depends on God for all things: God depends on man for one. Without man's love God does not exist as God, only as creator, and love is the one thing no one, not even God himself, can command. It is a free gift or it is nothing. And it is most itself, most free, when it is offered in spite of suffering, of injustice, and of death . . . The justification of the injustice of the universe is not our blind acceptance of God's inexplicable will, nor our trust in God's love, his dark and incomprehensible love, for us, but our human love, notwithstanding anything, for him.”