“But there is a kind of poem you can call a Hawkins poem as there is a kind of chair you can call a Hawkins chair, and the object of both is to get praise, which is the confidence in yourself that you get from people whom you have succeeded in pleasing when you haven't any confidence in yourself.”

“Of old there was a spirit, it was dark / Until it felt a pity for itself, / When the tremendous darkness shrieked and broke / Of its extreme and shone, mothering the light / That had been once but pain in the heart of night, / The night original and nameless. What / Brought morning and what made the dark a mother / To light and men? Nothing but woman in / A spirit could have wrought so safe and slow / Its ruin in perpetuity and peace.”

“People will think you brilliant only if you tell them what they know. To avoid being thought brilliant, avoid knowing what they know. Write to discover to yourself what you know. - Anarchism is Not Enough”

"Much of the magical effect that poetry gives of rendering everything it touches pellucid comes from the necessity of compression that it imposes. The impossibility of pausing in poetry as long as may be needed to make sense clear causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.“

“The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself”