There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake art that stands above classes art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

In religion as in politics it so happens that we have less charity for those who believe half our creed than for those who deny the whole of it.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins all of them imaginary.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke you've lost the whole thing.

For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.

Since the printing press came into being poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

Any long work in which poetry is persistent be it epic or drama or narrative is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters relationships and themes it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find the accidents of what you stumble across.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry.