Death's long anabasis.

Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.

So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.

But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.

Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.