“There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.”

“Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry.”

“As I grew older the poetic surround becomes more important. I realize that the 'poetic attention' was more important to me than poetry was. The 'poetic attention' being a kind of longing without the desire to posess.”

“Dancing is very like poetry. It's like poetic lyricism, sometimes, it's like the rawness of dramatic poetry, it's like the terror — or it can be like a terrible revelation of meaning. Because when you light on a word it strikes you to your heart.”

“He who improvises can never make a perfect line of poetry.”

“one can never be sure whether it's good poetry or bad acid”

“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize”

“Man can have no rights apart from society or independent of society or against society.”

“The difference between poetry and prose is not one of surface qualities, or form, or mode of expression, but of essence. The state of mind in which poetry originates must either seek poetic expression or it must not be expressed.”

“The greatest poets never write poetry. The Homers and Shakespeares are not the greatest — they are only the greatest that we can know. And so with Handel among musicians. For the highest poetry, whether in music or literature, is ineffable — it must be felt from one person to another, it cannot be articulated.”