Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth. Poetic art cheats truth to further and finer degrees than art of any other kind because the spoken word is its exclusive medium.

If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to…

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth:but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

Forgive me, giver, if I destroy the gift. It is so nearly what would please me I cannot but perfect it.

Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equ…

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic an…

There is a sense of life so real that it becomes the sense of something more real than life:It is the meaning at work in what has no meaning; it is, at its cle…