Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
No, you listen! All my life, you've told me that the world is a dark, cruel place. But now I see that the only thing dark and cruel about it is people like you!
Men of letters who cling to the private successes of their petty aesthetics shut themselves off from poetry's restless presence. From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue. The politician and the mediocre poets with their armour of symbols and mystic purities pretend to ignore the real poet.
The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.
A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.
War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost.
My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.
As the poet has expected, the alarms now are sounded, for--and it must be said again--the birth of a poet is always a threat to the existing cultural order, because he attempts to break through the circle of literary castes to reach the center.
The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.
Religious power, which, as I have already said, frequently identifies itself with political power, has always been a protagonist of this bitter struggle, even when it seemingly was neutral.
