I've always been in love with language. My favorite book is a dictionary. I have always loved words.
There's no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There's no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.
Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don't have to.
My love of written language is every bit as great as my love for music.
I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.
Who does not love his own tongue is far worse than a brute or stinking fish.
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
