I dwell in a lonely house I know That vanished many a summer ago.
The first thing I do in any town I come to is ask if it has a bookstore.
I have wished a bird would fly away, And not sing by my house all day; Have clapped my hands at him from the door When it seemed as if I could bear no more. The fault must partly have been in me. The bird was not to blame for his key. And of course there must be something wrong In wanting to silence any song.
What you want, what you're hanging around in the world waiting for, is for something to occur to you.
A breeze discovered my open book And began to flutter the leaves to look
I could give all to Time except--except What I myself have held.
loosely bound By countless silken ties of love and thought To everything on earth the compass round
When clever people ask me where I get a poem, I despair.
Never discuss the poem you contemplate writing. It's like turning on the outside spigot. It takes all the pressure off the upstairs bathroom.
It is only a moment here and a moment there that the greatest writer has. Some cognizance of the fact must be taken in your teaching.
... A nation has to take its natural course Of Progress round and round in circles From King to Mob to King to Mob to King Until the eddy of it eddies out.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-bye.
The sister's face Fell all in wrinkles of responsibility. She wanted to do right. She'd have to think.
You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
We ran as if to meet the moon.
And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.
Education is hanging around until you've caught on.
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. . . . Read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.
Loyalty is that for the lack of which your gang will shoot you without benefit of trial by jury.
Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.
It was far in the sameness of the wood; I was running with joy on the Demon's trail, Though I knew what I hunted was no true god.
Humor is the most engaging cowardice.
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