How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.

Dramatic experience is not logical; it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.

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

Men expect too much, do too little.