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Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.

Poems are endlessly renewable resources. Whatever you bring to them, at whatever stage of life, gets mirrored back, refracted, reread in new ways.

I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum - the poem finds a reason for continuing.

The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.