“Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.”

“Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.”

“A poem begins with a lump in the throat”

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”

“Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.”

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”