Human Life Without Some Form Of Poetry

Most Poets, Most Good Poets Even, No Longer Have The Heart To Write About What Is Most Terrible In The World Of The Present: The Bombs Waiting Beside The Rockets, The Hundreds Of Millions Staring Into The Temporary Shelter Of Their Television Sets, The Decline Of The West That Seems Less A Decline Than The Fall Preceding An Explosion.

It Is Better To Entertain An Idea Than To Take Home To Live With You For The Rest Of Your Life.

Underneath All His Writing There Is The Settled Determination To Use Certain Words, To Take Certain Attitudes, To Produce A Certain Atmosphere; What He Is Seeing Or Thinking Or Feeling Has Hardly Any Influence On The Way He Writes. The Reader Can Reply, Ironically, "that's What It Means To Have A Style"; But Few People Have So Much Of One, Or One So Obdurate That You Can Say Of It, "it Is A Style That No Subject Can Change.

I See At Last That All The Knowledge I Wrung From The Darkness - That Darkness Flung Me - Is Worthless As Ignorance: Nothing Comes From Nothing The Darkness From The Darkness. Pain Comes From The Darkness And We Call It Wisdom. It Is Pain.

The Real War Poets Are Always War Poets, Peace Or Any Time.