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The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for.

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.

That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

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

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.

The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.