In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.

So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.

The Spring I seek is in a new face only.

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.

Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.

At twelve I was determined to shoot only For honor; at twenty not to shoot at all; I know at thirty-three that one must shoot As often as one gets the rare chance - In killing there is more than commentary.

Narcissism and the Confederate dead cannot be connected logically, or even historically; even were the connection an historical fact, they would not stand connected as art, for no one experiences raw history.

Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.

The mission for the day is to encourage students to think beyond traditional career opportunities, prepare for future careers and entrance into the workplace.

I believe the term modulation denotes in music the uninterrupted shift from one key to another: I do not know the term for change of rhythm without change of measure.

Men expect too much, do too little.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

Dramatic experience is not logical; it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it came from.

In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.

Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.

Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.

A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.

According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!

The dusk runs down the lane driven like hail Far off a precise whistle is escheat To the dark and then the towering weak and pale.

There is a calm for you where men and women Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.

The dreary flies lazy and casual Stick to the ceiling buzz along the wall. O heart the spider shuffles from the mould Weaving between the pinks and grapes his pall.

I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

In other words, I have no truck for anyone who goes out and does an eclectic building.

Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

Duty, Honor, Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.

So, in other words, how you respond to a sculpture, how a viewer sees the sculpture, is vital.

I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.

The President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound... These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.

They call it golf because all the other four-letter words were taken.

In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.