“Nowadays when a poet with one privately printed book can have his next three years taken care of by a Guggenheim fellowship, a Kenyon Review fellowship, and the Prix de Rome, it is hard to remember what chances the poet took in that small-town world, how precariously hand-to-mouth his existence was. And yet in one way the old days were better; [Vachel] Lindsay after a while, by luck and skill, got far more readers than any poet could get today.”

“ONAELIA: What sort of poets are there?
POET: Two sorts lady: The great poets and the small poets.
ONAELIA: Great and small! Which do you call the great? The fat ones?”

“World-Poets too, those whom we are to take for perfect Poets, are settled by critics in the same way. One who rises so far above the general level of Poets will, to such and such critics, seem a Universal Poet; as he ought to do. And yet it is, and must be, an arbitrary distinction. All Poets, all men, have some touches of the Universal; no man is wholly made of that.”

“Old empires always appeal to modern poets more than new ones.”

“But where is last year's snow? This was the greatest care that Villon, the Parisian poet, took.”

“Not every poet is a great reader of his own work.”

“He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stone cutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.”

“The desire of a poet for his writings to be in print is as natural as a painter needs to exhibit his work in public.”

“When the house is burning down around the poet's head, on grounds of what if any dispensation can the poet continue the poem?”

“Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings — stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again.”