The rainy Pleiads wester Orion plunges prone, And midnight strikes and hastens, And I lie down alone.

They say my verse is sad: no wonder; Its narrow measure spans Tears of eternity, and sorrow, Not mine. but man's.

Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think.

To justify God's ways to man.

I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.

I think that to transfuse emotion - not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer - is the peculiar function of poetry.

I do not choose the right word, I get rid of the wrong one.