There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army. – John Ashbery
I dont look on poetry as closed works. I feel theyre going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length. – John Ashbery
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be. – John Ashbery
Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. – Sigmund Freud