If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Godel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems - people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets - it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, 'Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry.'

Sometimes it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and t…

When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it becau…

One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits of the American public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Americans read, during …

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.

L'oeuvre pure implique la disparition elocutoire du poete, qui cede l'initiative aux mots.

Genius still means to me, in my Russian, fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.