“Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.”

“It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.”

“no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.”

“And none will hear the postman’s knockWithout a quickening of the heart.For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?”

“You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.”

“In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.”

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”