In the earliest times, which were so susceptible to vague speculation and the inevitable ordering of the universe, there can have existed no division between the poetic and prosaic. Everything must have been tinged with magic. Thor was not the god of thunder; he was the thunder and the god.

For a true poet, every moment of existence, every act, ought to be poetic since, in essence, it is so.

A language is a tradition, a way of grasping reality, not an arbitrary assemblage of symbols.

The notion of art as a compromise is a simplification, for no one knows entirely what he is doing. A writer can conceive a fable, Kipling acknowledged, without grasping its moral.

All verse should have two obligations: to communicate a precise instance and to touch us physically, as the presence of the sea does.

After many – too many – years of practicing literature, I do not profess any aesthetic. Why add to the natural limits which habit imposes on us those of some theory or other? Theories, like convictions of a political or religious nature, are nothing more than stimuli.