Poetry Is No More A Narcotic Than

Hardly One Soldier In A Hundred Was Inspired By Religious Feeling Of Even The Crudest Kind. It Would Have Been Difficult To Remain Religious In The Trenches Even If One Had Survived The Irreligion Of The Training Battalion At Home.

Poetry Is No More A Narcotic Than A Stimulant; It Is A Universal Bittersweet Mixture For All Possible Household Emergencies And Its Action Varies Accordingly As It Is Taken In A Wineglass Or A Tablespoon, Inhaled, Gargled Or Rubbed On The Chest By Hard Fingers Covered With Rings.

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

Abstract Reason, Formerly The Servant Of Practical Human Reasons, Has Everywhere Become Its Master, And Denies Poetry Any Excuse For Existence. Though Philosophers Like To Define Poetry As Irrational Fancy, For Us It Is Practical, Humorous, Reasonable Way Of Being Ourselves. Of Never Acquiescing In A Fraud; Of Never Accepting The Secondary-rate In Poetry, Painting, Music, Love, Friends. Of Safeguarding Our Poetic Institutions Against The Encroachments Of Mechanized, Insensate, Inhumane, Abstract Rationality.

The Sap Of Spring In The Young Wood A-stir Will Celebrate With Green The Mother, And Every Song-bird Shout Awhile For Her; But We Are Gifted, Even In November Rawest Of Seasons, With So Huge A Sense Of Her Nakedly Worn Magnificence We Forget Cruelty And Past Betrayal, Heedless Of Where The Next Bright Bolt May Fall.