The air is full of a farewell- deserted by the silver lake lies the wild world, overturned. Cities rise where the mountains fell, the furnace where the phoenix burned

Sensing us, the trees tremble in their sleep, The living leaves recoil before our fires, Baring to us war-charred and broken branches, And seeing theirs, we for our own destruction weep.

Chemistry dissolves the goddess in the alembic, Venus, the white queen, the universal matrix, Down to the molecular hexagons and carbon-chains.

Of all the arts the living of a life is perhaps the greatest to live every moment of life with the same imaginative commitment as the poet brings to a special field.

Being a poet is not a job or a profession but a way of life.

Academia is a graveyard of poets.

The work of the artist is to heal the soul.

I make no apology for writing in nature's age-old and unaging language, of whose images we build our paradises, Broceliande and Brindavan, the Forest of Arden, Xanadu, Shelley's Skies, or even Wordsworth's Grasemere, which can be found on no map.

And see the peaceful trees extend their myriad leaves in leisured dance- they bear the weight of sky and cloud upon the fountain of their veins.

It was not the purpose of poetry to record anything and everything, to merely describe either the outer world or some subjective mood, but to speak from the imagination of the poet to the imagination of the reader.

Meanings, moods, the whole scale of our inner experience, finds in nature the 'correspondences' through which we may know our boundless selves.

Poetry is not an end in itself but in the service of life of what use are poems, or any other works of art, unless to enable human lives to be lived with insight of a deeper kind, with more sensitive feelings, more intense sense of the beautiful, with deeper understanding?

I've read all the books but one Only remains sacred: this Volume of wonders, open Always before my eyes.