“Think of yourself rather as something much humbler and less spectacular, but to my mind, far more interesting — a poet in whom live all the poets of the past, from whom all poets in time to come will spring. You have a touch of Chaucer in you, and something of Shakespeare; Dryden, Pope, Tennyson — to mention only the respectable among your ancestors — stir in your blood and sometimes move your pen a little to the right or to the left. In short you are an immensely ancient, complex, and continuous character, for which reason please treat yourself with respect and think twice before you dress up as Guy Fawkes and spring out upon timid old ladies at street corners, threatening death and demanding twopence-halfpenny.”

“(…) and for my part I do not believe in poets dying; Keats, Shelley, Byron, are alive here in this room in you and you and you - (…)”

“The objects of my affection are never aware of the place they hold in my heart, or that I am so primed with the details of their existence that I can at any moment of the day pinpoint their whereabouts. But so remote am I, and so aloof, that they may not even think of me as a friend. None long to know me as long as I know them; all are normal, as I think of it; none, as I also think of it, are queer.”