Since The Age Of 15 Poetry Has

To Recommend A Monarchy On Account Of The Prosperity It Gives The Provinces Seems To Me Like Recommending That A Man Should Have Liberty To Treat His Children As Slaves, If At The Same Time He Treats His Slaves With Reasonable Consideration.

Before An Attack, The Platoon Pools All Its Available Cash And The Survivors Divide It Up Afterwards. Those Who Are Killed Can't Complain, The Wounded Would Have Given Far More Than That To Escape As They Have, And The Unwounded Regard The Money As A Consolation Prize For Still Being Here.

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.

As Was The Custom In Such Cases, The Pear Tree Was Charged With Murder And Sentenced To Be Uprooted And Burned.

But Give Thanks, At Least, That You Still Have Frost's Poems; And When You Feel The Need Of Solitude, Retreat To The Companionship Of Moon, Water, Hills And Trees. Retreat, He Reminds Us, Should Not Be Confused With Escape. And Take These Poems Along For Good Luck!