“This image became something I had to be.”

Recalling how the childhood idea of becoming a poet shaped his identity · Interview, The Paris Review (1968)

• Childhood
• Identity
• Poetry

“The fact is that in such cases the temperament comes first, the theory afterwards.”

Suggesting that artistic theories often rationalise instincts already present in the artist · Essay, Poetic Realism: Carl Sandburg, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Instinct
• Truth

“The conception of what it is that constitutes the lyric scope has, if anything, petrified.”

Criticising the narrow conventions that had come to limit lyric poetry · Essay, Narrative Poetry and the Vestigial Lyric, Scepticisms (1919)

• Art
• Convention
• Poetry