You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.
The promising young poets, the hopefuls? I'd name Richard Wilbur, Peter Viereck, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ciardi...Leonard Bacon...but it is still too early to assertions. They're all 'in the field.' It remains to be seen how many will cross the finish line.
A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.
The heart's gone out of it, why keep it up.
What but design of darkness to appall?- If design govern in a thing so small.
If you don't know how great this country is, I know someone who does; Russia.
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.
We shall be known by the delicacy of where we stop short.
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.
All the fun's in how you say a thing.
Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.
The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.
I sha'n't catch up in this world, anyway. I'd rather you'd not go unless you must.
The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.
There are no two things as important to us in life and in art as being threatened and being saved. What are ideals of form for if we aren't going to be made to fear for them? All our ingenuity is lavished on getting into danger legitimately so that we may be genuinely rescued.
A man must partly give up being a man With women-folk.
The middle of the road is where the white line is—and that's the worst place to drive.
I always entertain great hopes.
You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's.
An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.
Im against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.
We go to school to learn what books to read for the rest of our lives.
Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so.
Hell is a half-filled auditorium.
Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?
Unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.
You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.
Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.
Yes, and even for the past...that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was. Something I can accept. Mistakes made by the self I had to be or was not able to be.
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I'll forgive Thy great big joke on me.
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.
Life must be kept up at a great rate in order to absorb any considerable amount of learning.
Education is hanging around until you've caught on.
Youre searching Joe for things that dont exist I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings-there are no such things.
He asked with the eyes more than the lips for a shelter for the night.
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
Families break up when they get hints you don't intend and miss hints that you do.
The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.
So I took the road less traveled by and that has made all the difference.
I go to school the youth to learn the future.
Two such as you with such a master speed, cannot be parted nor be swept away, from one another once you are agreed, that life is only life forevermore, together wing to wing and oar to oar.
It's a funny thing that when a man hasn't anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.
