The Safest Way To Avoid The World

The Safest Way To Avoid The World Is Through Art; And The Safest Way To Be Linked To The World Is Through Art.

Nowadays When A Poet With One Privately Printed Book Can Have His Next Three Years Taken Care Of By A Guggenheim Fellowship, A Kenyon Review Fellowship, And The Prix De Rome, It Is Hard To Remember What Chances The Poet Took In That Small-town World, How Precariously Hand-to-mouth His Existence Was. And Yet In One Way The Old Days Were Better; [vachel] Lindsay After A While, By Luck And Skill, Got Far More Readers Than Any Poet Could Get Today.

Poetry Is A Bad Medium For Philosophy. Everything In The Philosophical Poem Has To Satisfy Irreconcilable Requirements: For Instance, The Last Demand That We Should Make Of Philosophy (that It Be Interesting) Is The First We Make Of A Poem; The Philosophical Poet Has An Elevated And Methodical, But Forlorn And Absurd Air As He Works Away At His Flying Tank, His Sewing-machine That Also Plays The Piano.

You Give Me The Feeling That The Universe Was Made By Something More Than Human For Something Less Than Human. But I Identify Myself, As Always, With Something That There's Something Wrong With, With Something Human.

Modern" Poetry Is, Essentially, An Extension Of Romanticism; It Is What Romantic Poetry Wishes Or Finds It Necessary To Become. It Is The End Product Of Romanticism, All Past And No Future; It Is Impossible To Go Further By Any Extrapolation Of The Process By Which We Have Arrived, And Certainly It Is Impossible To Remain Where We Are Who Could Endure A Century Of Transition ?