“No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.”

What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

The what is so much more important than how.

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.

Rhythm is form cut into time.

I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.