Whether They Write Poems Or Don't Write

It Is Better To Entertain An Idea Than To Take Home To Live With You For The Rest Of Your Life.

Both In Verse And In Prose [karl] Shapiro Loves, Partly Out Of Indignation And Partly Out Of Sheer Mischievousness, To Tell The Naked Truths Or Half-truths Or Quarter-truths That Will Make Anybody's Hair Stand On End; He Is Always Crying: "but He Hasn't Any Clothes On!" About An Emperor Who Is Half The Time Surprisingly Well-dressed.

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."

Except From The Americans—but Every Pearl Has Its Oyster.

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.)