“According to my present theme the writer of imagination would attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are dissassociated from natural objects and specified meanings but when they are liberated from the usual quality of that meaning by transportation into another medium, the imagination.”

“Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.”

“As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.”

“The only realism in art is of the imagination.”

“Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.”

“Filth and vermin though they shock the over-nice are imperfections of the flesh closely related in the just imagination of the poet to excessive cleanliness.”

“The past above, the future belowand the present pouring down: the roar,the roar of the present, a speech--is, of necessity, my sole concern.”