You fall into my arms. You are the good gift of destruction's path, When life sickens more than disease. And boldness is the root of beauty. Which draws us together.

Orioles kept making their clear three-note calls, stopping each time just long enough to let the countryside suck in the moist fluting sounds down to the last vibration.

Through its inborn faculty of hearing, poetry seeks the melody of nature amid the noise of the dictionary, then, picking it out like picking out a tune, it gives itself up to improvisation on that theme.

No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of a forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly, in the very darkest, most stunned and panicked moment, it rolls to its end and begins to speak with all the treetops at once.

The trains either don’t run at all or come so full that it is impossible to get on them.

Language, the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in the sense of outward audible sounds but by virtue of the power and momentum of its inward flow.

I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one’s speciality seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish.

You come out; it is still dark. The door creaks, or perhaps you sneeze, or the snow crunches under your foot, and hares start up from the far cabbage patch and leap away, leaving the snow criss-crossed with tracks. In the distance dogs begin to howl and it takes a long time before the quieten down. The cocks have finished their crowing and have nothing left to say. Then dawn breaks.

As it fantasizes, poetry comes across nature. The real, living world is the only project of the imagination which has once succeeded and which still goes on being endlessly successful. Look at it continuing, moment after moment a success. It is still real, still deep, utterly absorbing. It is not something you are disappointed in next morning. It serves the poet as example, even more than a sitter or a model.

Only the superfluous is dirty.