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"A tough life needs a tough language-and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers-a language powerful enough to say how it is."
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Personal Development

"I suppose that's how it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through poetry and I think it's nicer' Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed 'to look at it through poetry."
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Personal Development

"There are many unspeakable words, forgotten, or forbidden.Great thanks to the poets who make them all become reachable."
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Personal Development

"I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them."
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Personal Development

"Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words."
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Personal Development

"Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry."
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Personal Development

"For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming."
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"Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems."
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Personal Development

"Each day before the end of eveshe sought her lover, nor would him leave,until the stars were dimmed, and daycame glimmering eastward silver-grey.Then trembling-veiled she would appear,and dance before him, half in fear;there flitting just before his feetshe gently chid with laughter sweet:'Come! dance now, Beren, dance with me!For fain thy dancing I would see!"
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"It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,-a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form."
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"I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way."
Work

"As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery."
Art

"Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help."
Poetry

"I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex."
Sex

"I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home."
Home

"There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply."
Poetry

"It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!"
Time

"When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to."
Being

"We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy."
Writing

"I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about."
People
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