If Wishes Were Stories, Beggars Would Read.

Age Could Not Wither Nor Custom Stale Her Infinite Monotony: In Fact, Neither Age Nor Custom Could Do Anything (as They Said, Their Voices Rising) With The American Novelist Gertrude Johnson.

I Think Miss Moore Was Right To Cut "the Steeple-jack" - The Poem Seems Plainer And Clearer In Its Shortened State But She Has Cut Too Much... The Reader May Feel Like Saying, "let Her Do As She Pleases With The Poem; It's Hers, Isn't It?" No; It's Much Too Good A Poem For That, It Long Ago Became Everybody's, And We Can Protest Just As We Could If Donatello Cut Off David's Left Leg.

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.

From My Mother's Sleep I Fell Into The State, And I Hunched In Its Belly Till My Wet Fur Froze. Six Miles From Earth, Loosed From The Dream Of Life, I Woke To Black Flak And The Nightmare Fighters. When I Died They Washed Me Out Of The Turret With A Hose.

I Decided That Europeans And Americans Are Like Men And Women: They Understand Each Other Worse, And It Matters Less, Than Either Of Them Suppose.