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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone's notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

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.

Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.

Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.