We Always Tend To Distrust Geniuses About

Say What You Like, But Such Things Do Happen - Not Often, But They Do Happen.

I Think Miss Moore Was Right To Cut "the Steeple-jack" - The Poem Seems Plainer And Clearer In Its Shortened State But She Has Cut Too Much... The Reader May Feel Like Saying, "let Her Do As She Pleases With The Poem; It's Hers, Isn't It?" No; It's Much Too Good A Poem For That, It Long Ago Became Everybody's, And We Can Protest Just As We Could If Donatello Cut Off David's Left Leg.

I Don't Need To Praise Anything So Justly Famous As Frost's Observation Of And Empathy With Everything In Nature From A Hornet To A Hillside; And He Has Observed His Own Nature, One Person's Random Or Consequential Chains Of Thoughts And Feelings And Perceptions, Quite As Well. (and This Person, In The Poems, Is Not The "alienated Artist" Cut Off From Everybody Who Isn't, Yum-yum, Another Alienated Artist; He Is Someone Like Normal People Only More So - A Normal Person In The Less Common And More Important Sense Of Normal.)

The Usual Bad Poem In Somebody's Collected Works Is A Learned, Mannered, Valued Habit, A Habit A Little More Careful Than, And Little Emptier Than, Brushing One's Teeth.

Christina Stead Has A Chinese Say, "our Old Age Is Perhaps Life's Decision About Us" Or, Worse, The Decision We Have Made About Ourselves Without Ever Realizing We Were Making It.