It is better to have the child in the chimney corner moved by what happens in the poem, in spite of his ignorance of its real meaning, than to have the poem a puzzle to which that meaning is the only key. Still, complicated subjects make complicated poems, and some of the best poems can move only the best readers; this is one more question of curves of normal distribution. I have tried to make my poems plain, and most of them are plain enough; but I wish that they were more difficult because I had known more.

One is forced to remember how far from 'self-expression' great poems are - what a strange compromise between the demands of the self, the world, and Poetry the…

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good,…

We know from many experiences that this is what the work of art does: its life - in which we have shared the alien existences both of this world and of that di…

I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Jejunis nil scribo: meum post pocula si quis legerit, hic sapiet. Sed magis hic sapiet, si dormiet: et putet ista somnia missa sibi.

In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions o…