“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.”

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

“Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.”

“I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.”

“beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.”

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

“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.”