“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.”

“I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.”

“And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.”

“…(hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)…”

“All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.”

“Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.”

“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”

“To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.”

“The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.”

“In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is "Where do you teach?" The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It's just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones.”