“The blood jet is poetry,There is no stopping it.--from "Kindness", written 1 February 1963”
“Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.”
“Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.[Quoting Reverend Phillips Brooks, during Remarks at Presidential Prayer Breakfast, February 7 1963]”
“Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.”
“Beached under the spumy blooms, we lieSea-sick and fever-dry.--from "Withsun", written 14 February 1961”
“For [W. B.] Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness.”