It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

Don’t give up. You have invested a lot of time already.

It is a tragic fact that the vast majority of Christians today are living a sub-normal Christian life.

Imagine about anything instead of assume about it.

The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.

You can't force someone to sell property in America.

My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.

A certain excessiveness seems a necessary element in all greatness.

And so there is magic.

It's fun to work on location because you get the look and feel of everything, but it's nice to be on a stage because you can control the elements.

Ignorant power is a bane!