I look for the humanity in people however big the politics or oppressive the situation may be whether it's subsumed within a human being or between two human beings. I want to help us hold a mirror to ourselves.

Once every five hundred years or so a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

We all need ways to express ourselves and poetry is one of mine.

As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old inwardly its poetry is much deeper.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric but of the quarrel with ourselves poetry.

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.

War is not the quintessential emergency in which man has to prove himself as my generation learned at its school desks in the days of the Kaiser rather peace is the emergency in which we all have to prove ourselves.

We can only move to a long-term resolution regarding terrorism and war by planting seeds of peace. We have to start with ourselves.

We have peace with God as soon as we believe but not always with ourselves. The pardon may be past the prince's hand and seal and yet not put into the prisoner's hand.