I Don't Really Feel My Poems Are

Though Philosophers Like To Define Poetry As Irrational Fancy, For Us It Is Practical, Humorous, Reasonable Way Of Being Ourselves.

Any Honest Housewife Would Sort Them Out,/ Having A Nose For Fish, An Eye For Apples.

To Know Only One Thing Well Is To Have A Barbaric Mind: Civilization Implies The Graceful Relation Of All Varieties Of Experience To A Central Humane System Of Thought. The Present Age Is Peculiarly Barbaric: Introduce, Say, A Hebrew Scholar To An Ichthyologist Or An Authority On Danish Place Names And The Pair Of Them Would Have No Single Topic In Common But The Weather Or The War (if There Happened To Be A War In Progress, Which Is Usual In This Barbaric Age).

I Don't Really Feel My Poems Are Mine At All. I Didn't Create Them Out Of Nothing. I Owe Them To My Relations With Other People.

We Once Discussed Which Were The Cleanest Troops In The Trenches, Taken By Nationalities. We Agreed On A Descending-order Like This: English And German Protestants; Northern Irish, Welsh And Canadians; Irish And German Catholics; Scots; Mohammedan Indians; Algerians; Portugese; Belgians; French. We Put The Belgians And French There For Spite; They Could Not Have Been Dirtier Than The Algerians And The Portugese.