“A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.”

“Well, here I suppose is my life, or part of it, by which I would wish to be judged… poems which have been written from a sense of compulsion, a real need to explore and articulate experiences which have been important to me.”

“You must understand the whole of life,
not just one little part of it.
that is why you must read,
that is why you must look at the skies,
that is why you must sing and dance,
and write poems and suffer and understand,
for all that is life.”

“A poem should not mean
But be.”

“A poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”

“Part of making a poem is a process of day- dreaming.”

“The poet should be responsible to the poem.”

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

“Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”

“A poem should improve on the blank page.”