There Is In This World No Line

Imagism Was A Reductio Ad Absurdum Of One Or Two Tendencies Of Romanticism, Such A Beautifully And Finally Absurd One That It Is Hard To Believe It Existed As Anything But A Logical Construction; And What Imagist Found It Possible To Go On Writing Imagist Poetry? A Number Of Poets Have Stopped Writing Entirely; Others, Like Recurring Decimals, Repeat The Novelties They Commeced With, Each Time Less Valuably Than Before. And There Are Surrealist Poetry, And Political Poetry, And All The Othe Refuges Of The Indigent.

An Intelligent Man Said That The World Felt Napoleon As A Weight, And That When He Died It Would Give A Great Oof Of Relief. This Is Just As True Of Byron, Or Of Such Byrons Of Their Days As Kipling And Hemingway: After A Generation Or Two The World Is Tired Of Being Their Pedestal, Shakes Them Of With An Oof, And Then - Hoisting Onto Its Back A New World-figure - Feels The Penetrating Satisfaction Of Having Made A Mistake All Its Own.

Most Poets, Most Good Poets Even, No Longer Have The Heart To Write About What Is Most Terrible In The World Of The Present: The Bombs Waiting Beside The Rockets, The Hundreds Of Millions Staring Into The Temporary Shelter Of Their Television Sets, The Decline Of The West That Seems Less A Decline Than The Fall Preceding An Explosion.

If My Tone Is Mocking, The Tone Of Someone Accustomed To Helplessness, This Is Natural: The Poet Is A Condemned Man For Whom The State Will Not Even Buy Breakfast And As Someone Said, "if You're Going To Hang Me, You Mustn't Expect To Be Able To Intimidate Me Into Sparing Your Feelings During The Execution."

People Had Always Seemed To Gertrude Rather Like The Beasts In Animal Farm : All Equally Detestable, But Some More Equally Detestable Than Others.