“I’m sick of my always hurdygurdying these little griefs out and me like a monkey on the top of it all with my beggar’s cap.”

A painfully comic expression of weariness with his own troubles and dependence on patrons · Letter to Princess Marguerite Caetani, 1951

• Despair
• Truth

“In the shape of a boy, and a funny boy at that, I have only a very short time to learn how mad and marvellous it is.”

Combining youthful wonder with an acute awareness of mortality · Letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, New Year 1934

• Childhood
• Mortality
• Time

“Do not be too eager to be a poet. Be too eager to be a human being.”

Putting humane experience before literary ambition · Advice or conversation, as commonly attributed

• Poetry
• Truth