We never feel Christ to be a reality, until we feel Him to be a necessity
The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower
There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world of favours and backscratching.
I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.
In America, where you'd have thought the country's so huge it couldn't happen quite so cosily, everyone's giving his imprimatur to everyone else. You line up three or four well-known poets and a couple of eminent academics on the dustjacket, and the rest of academe follow like sheep. That's death really, if you take pleasure in it. Mind you, the occasional puff's hard to resist, but you shouldn't inhale.
I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.
I don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of knowledge. At some stage a form or, rather, a shape mysteriously emerges.
Gary Condit is on the Congressional committee for Homeland Security. They make the guy responsible for Homeland Security who is the guy no one would feel secure going home with.
A noble life crowned with heroic death, rises above and outlives the pride and pomp and glory of the mightiest empire of the earth.
All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.
We overcome the accuser of our brothers and sisters, we overcome our consciences, we overcome our bad tempers, we overcome our defeats, we overcome our lusts, we overcome our fears, we overcome our pettiness on the basis of the blood of the Lamb.