“Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden the drumming of the demon in their ears”

“Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden the drumming of the demon in their ears”

“But glad to have sat underThunder and rain with you,And grateful tooFor sunlight on the garden.”

“World is suddener than we fancy it.”

“The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.”

“The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.”

“Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.”

“Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.”

“I am not yet born O fill me with strength against those who would freeze my humanity. ”

“I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more' could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.”

“Let us thank God for valour in abstractionFor those who go their own way, will not kissThe arse of law and order nor compoundFor physical comfort at the price of pride”

“Their ghosts are gagged, their books are library flotsam,Some of their names - not all - we learnt in schoolBut, life being short, we rarely read their poems,Mere source-books now to point or except a rule,While those opinions which rank them high are basedOn a wish to be different or on lack of taste.”