I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.
In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.
A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.
A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.
