Attention is the beginning of devotion.

Art comes, if we are blessed with ... a "little touch of grace," into the highest part of the mind ... But we have to pay attention to that area in order to notice the grace, or even perhaps to attract it.

I can only be alert to the current and make sure to ride it when it does happen.

Purity of aspiration seems virtually prerequisite to genuine inspiration.

Using all my faculties, I could plumb deeper, without sinking forever.

There seems to be a law that the more conscious knowledge you develop, the more you can expand your consciousness. The artist takes advantage of this law.

Poetry is not made of words.

there are no people. Poetry / does not live here, unless poetry truly is / on the side of things that have no language.

Today is promising, tremendously promising. Wherever I go, whatever I see, whatever my eye or ear touches, the space radiates expansion. I want to think. The desire announced itself with the word "concentration."

what are poetry's themes, grotesque little figures released by a spring from a box when the lid is lifted by another

like poetry, I'm refusing to understand what I mean

Create a file of newspaper articles that seem to relate to the chances of writing poetry.

I often felt that our life lacked beauty; I looked for it in music, in poetry and painting, sometimes in the world itself, when a particular evening sky or fall of light, a glimpse of city trees in leaf or of the forms of my children, seemed to become more real than itself

The poem finds the word that finds the feeling

when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.

she saw things alive and she was them whole, with the unity which belongs to things seen by painter or poet

"when I saw this lowly Building in the waters among the Dark and lofty hills, with that bright soft light upon it, it made me more than half a poet"

it was like that moment when you just happen to see the streetlights come on and it feels like you're being given a gift, or a chance, or that you yourself've been singled out and chosen by the moment.

poetry ... you, all of you, ignore it. What the dead poet said, you have forgotten. And I cannot translate it to you so that its binding power ropes you in

Philosophers, artists, and poets must help decide whether it is permissible to use chemicals in farming ... [to preserve the] essential dramas of nature

When we are harassed by sorrows or anxieties, or long oppressed by any powerful feelings which we must keep to ourselves, for which we can obtain and seek no sympathy from any living creature, and which yet we cannot, or will not wholly crush, we often naturally seek relief in poetry – and often find it too – whether in the effusions of others, which seem to harmonize with our existing case, or in our own attempts to give utterance to those thoughts and feelings in strains less musical, perchance, but more appropriate, and therefore more penetrating and sympathetic, and, for the time, more soothing, or more powerful to rouse and to unburden the oppressed and swollen heart.

As if a theory of writing poetry is useful whereas the poem is not

a Latin Sabine or Etruscan mother
Who didn't have the time, chance, education or notion
To write some poetry so I could know
What she thought about things