Except From The Americans—but Every Pearl Has

Imagism Was A Reductio Ad Absurdum Of One Or Two Tendencies Of Romanticism, Such A Beautifully And Finally Absurd One That It Is Hard To Believe It Existed As Anything But A Logical Construction; And What Imagist Found It Possible To Go On Writing Imagist Poetry? A Number Of Poets Have Stopped Writing Entirely; Others, Like Recurring Decimals, Repeat The Novelties They Commeced With, Each Time Less Valuably Than Before. And There Are Surrealist Poetry, And Political Poetry, And All The Othe Refuges Of The Indigent.

When General Eisenhower Defined An Intellectual As "a Man Who Takes More Words Than Is Necessary To Tell More Than He Knows", He Was Speaking Not As A Republican But As An American.

We Always Tend To Distrust Geniuses About Genius, As If What They Say Didn't Arouse Much Empathy In Us, Or As If We Were Waiting Till Some More Reliable Source Of Information Came Along...

Few Poets Have Made A More Interesting Rhetoric Out Of Just Fooling Around: Turning Things Upside Down, Looking At Them From Under The Sofa, Considering Them (and Their Observer) Curiously Enough To Make The Reader Protest, "that Were To Consider It Too Curiously.

When You Begin To Read A Poem You Are Entering A Foreign Country Whose Laws And Language And Life Are A Kind Of Translation Of Your Own; But To Accept It Because Its Stews Taste Exactly Like Your Old Mother's Hash, Or To Reject It Because The Owl-headed Goddess Of Wisdom In Its Temple Is Fatter Than The Statue Of Liberty, Is An Equal Mark Of That Want Of Imagination, That Inaccessibility To Experience, Of Which Each Of Us Who Dies A Natural Death Will Die.