We Died Like Aunts Of Pets Or

The Best Of Causes Ruins As Quickly As The Worst; And The Road To Limbo Is Paved With Writers Who Have Done Everything I Am Being Sympathetic, Not Satiric For The Very Best Reasons.

Art Is Long, And Critics Are The Insects Of A Day.

Anyone Who Has Read Yeats's Wonderful Autobiography Will Remember His Sligo Shabby, Shadowed, Half Country And Half Sea, Full Of Confused Romance, Superstition, Poverty, Eccentricity, Unrecognized Anachronism, Passion And Ignorance And The Little Boy's Misery. Yeats Was Treated Well But Was Bitterly Unhappy; He Prayed That He Would Die, And Used Often To Say To Himself: "when You Are Grown Up, Never Talk As Grown-up People Do Of The Happiness Of Childhood.

If You Look At The World With Parted Lips And A Pure Heart, And Will The Good, Won't That Make A True And Beautiful Poem? One's Heart Tells One That It Will; And One's Heart Is Wrong. There Is No Direct Road To Parnassus.

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.