ROBERT HAYDEN

[Poetry is] a way of coming to grips with reality . . . a way of discovery and definition. It is a way of solving for the unknowns.

We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.

Nothing is so envied as genius, nothing so hopeless of attainment by labor alone. Though labor always accompanies the greatest genius, without the intellectual gift labor alone will do little.

Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.

Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn.

Religion and education are no match for evil without the grace of God.

Nothing is so envied as genius, nothing so hopeless of attainment by labor alone. Though labor always accompanies the greatest genius, without the intellectual gift labor alone will do little.

Religion and education are no match for evil without the grace of God.

Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn.

We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.

As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery.

I believe it's true that one person can make a difference. But how much more difference 100 people make, or rather 99.

[Poetry is] a way of coming to grips with reality . . . a way of discovery and definition. It is a way of solving for the unknowns.

Your presence was shore where I rested/ released from the hoodoo of that dance, where I spoke/ with my true voice again.

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fire blazes. No one ever thanked him.

Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.

This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth.