"Good poetry seems so simple and natural..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau

“As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.”

“Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.”

“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”

“I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.”

“Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”

“Not by wisdom do they [poets] make what they compose, but by a gift of nature and an inspiration similar to that of the diviners and the oracles.”

“Once out of nature I shall never takeMy bodily form from any natural thing,But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make”

“We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe.”

“We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.”