"A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."

"Good fences make good neighbors."

"The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as Lowell or Emerson or Wordsworth might have given, but a momentary stay …"

"School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past."

"I'm not a nature lover. I don't love nature. I love some of it. I love some people, but I don't love humanity."