"In poetry you are really solving x, looking for the unknown quantity. You are trying to say what cannot be said any other way--and, in some poems, you are trying to say what really cannot be said at all." --Robert Hayden, referencing Auden's process
"I object to strict definitions of what a poet is or should be, because they usually are thought up by people with an axe to grind--by those who care less about poetry than they do about some cause. We're living in a time when individuality is threatened by a kind of mechanizing anonymity, and by regimentation. In order to be free, you must submit to tyranny, to ideological slavery, in the name of freedom. And obviously, this is the enemy of the artist; it stultifies anything creative... Poetry, all art, it seems to me, is ultimately religious in the broadest sense of the term. It grows out of, reflects, illuminates our inmost selves, and so on. It doesn't have to be sectarian or denominational." --Hayden
"I think that today when so often one gets the feeling that everything is going downhill, that we're really on the brink of the abyss and what good is anything, I find myself sustained in my attempts to be a poet and my endeavor to write because I have the assurance of my faith that this is of spiritual value and it is a way of performing some kind of service." --Hayden
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