Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime Put on his pistols and went riding out But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time Till he fell in with ladies in a rout.

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.

But we moderns are impatient and destructive.

God have mercy on the sinner Who must write with no dinner, No gravy and no grub, No pewter and no pub, No bellyand no bowels, Only consonants and vowels.

In all the good Greek of Plato I lack my roastbeef and potato. A better man was Aristotle, Pulling steady on the bottle.

He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form.

Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet.

It is a miracle of harmony, of the adaptation of the free inner life to the outward necessity of things.

For no art and no religion is possible until we make allowances, until we manage to keep quiet the enfant terrible of logic that plays havoc with the other faculties.

[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

Conventional names define a person's past: ancestry, ethnicity, nationality, religion. I am not who I was ten years ago and certainly not who I will be in twenty years

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight - it's the size of the fight in the dog.

Soometimes when you have something that seems too good to be true, you start waiting for it to crumble to pieces around you.

Better than chanting a thousand words in a dead language is one soothing word spoken in the vernacular.

Revisiting the Revolutionary War is a bracing reminder that the fate of a continent, and the shape of the modern world, turned on the free choices of remarkably few Americans defying an empire.

You want to write something as good as what you've read.

Anonymity is not necessarily something to shun; we don't have to achieve celebrity to make a mark on the world.

I'm the audience's representative on earth.

Who will take responsibility for raising the next generation?