If Wishes Were Stories, Beggars Would Read.

If You Never Look Just Wrong To Your Contemporaries You Will Never Look Just Right To Posterity - Every Writer Has To Try To Be, To Some Extent, Sometimes, A Law Unto Himself.

Originality" Is Everyone's Aim, And Novel Techniques Are As Much Prized As New Scientific Discoveries. [t.s.] Eliot States It With Surprising Naïveté: "it Is Exactly As Wasteful For A Poet To Do What Has Been Done Already As For A Biologist To Rediscover Mendel's Discoveries.

Pain Comes From The Darkness. And We Call It Wisdom. It Is Pain.

If Poetry Were Nothing But Texture, [dylan] Thomas Would Be As Good As Any Poet Alive. The What Of His Poems Is Hardly Essential To Their Success, And The Best And Most Brilliantly Written Pieces Usually Say Less Than The Worst.

There Are Some Good Things And Some Fantastic Ones In Auden's Early Attitude; If The Reader Calls It A Muddle I Shall Acquiesce, With The Remark That The Later Position Might Be Considered A More Rarefied Muddle. But Poets Rather Specialize In Muddles And I Have No Doubt Which Of The Muddles Was Better For Auden's Poetry: One Was Fertile And Usable, The Other Decidedly Is Not. Auden Sometimes Seems To Be Saying With Henry Clay, "i Had Rather Be Right Than Poetry"; But I Am Not Sure, Then, That He Is Either.