I will have shepherds for my philosophers, Tall dreary men lying on the hills all night Watching the stars, let their dogs watch the sheep. And I'll have lunatics For my poets, strolling from farm to farm, wild liars distorting The country news into supernaturalism - For all men to such minds are devils or gods - and that increases Man's dignity, man's importance, necessary lies Best told by fools.

He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante's Florence, no anthropoid God Making commandments: this is the God who does not care and will neve…

Science and mathematics Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it, They never touch it: consider what an explosion Would rock the bones of …

Here is a symbol in which Many high tragic thoughts Watch their own eyes.

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…

Klopstock was questioned regarding the meaningof a passage in his poem. He replied, 'God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.'