"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."

"I would like to be a person of words. I would like to be a person of ideas. I am not."

"You come too. My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make. It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, Or easy gold at the hand of king or queen Or anything but what one's hands can make."

"A poem is never a put-up job."

"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 …"