As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual
As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.
En ge ne ral, plus un peuple est civilise , poli, moins ses moeurs sont poe tiques; tout s'affaiblit en s'adoucissant. Ingeneral, themore civilized and refinedthepeople, the less poetic are its morals; everything weakens as it mellows.
I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.
I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.
I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.
Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.
