“That perhaps is your task–to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist’s way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet’s way.”

eremitism

“The art historians make the differentiation between Romantic and Classic, but that has little sense before the nineteenth century […] No, the difference is between those who believe that life is essentially tragic and those who do not. I do not. The individual is tragic. But the individual can also question this tragedy and so become heroic: heroism consists of understanding that the achievement can be greater than the individual achiever.”

“…and yet what we truly are is whatever the impossible creates inside us.”