The Tiger Springs In The New Year.

One Of The Surest Tests Of The Superiority Or Inferiority Of A Poet Is The Way In Which A Poet Borrows. Immature Poets Imitate Mature Poets Steal Bad Poets Deface What They Take And Good Poets Make It Into Something Better Or At Least Something Different. The Good Poet Welds His Theft Into A Whole Of Feeling Which Is Unique Utterly Different Than That From Which It Is Torn The Bad Poet Throws It Into Something Which Has No Cohesion. A Good Poet Will Usually Borrow From Authors Remote In Time Or Alien In Language Or Diverse In Interest.

To Arrive Where You Are, To Get From Where You Are Not / You Must Go By A Way Wherein There Is No Ecstasy.

It Is Self-evident That St. Louis Affected Me More Deeply Than Any Other Environment Has Ever Done. I Feel That There Is Something In Having Passed One's Childhood Beside The Big River, Which Is Incommunicable To Those People Who Have Not. I Consider Myself Fortunate To Have Been Born Here, Rather Than In Boston, Or New York, Or London.

Destiny ... A Word Which Means More Than We Can Find Any Definitions For. It Is A Word Which Can Have No Meaning In A Mechanical Universe: If That Which Is Wound Up Must Run Down, What Destiny Is There In That? Destiny Is Not Necessitarianism, And It Is Not Caprice: It Is Something Essentially Meaningful. Each Man Has His Destiny, Though Some Men Are Undoubtedly "men Of Destiny" In A Sense In Which Most Men Are Not.

The Lot Of Man Is Ceaseless Labor, Or Ceaseless Idleness, Which Is Still Harder.