Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.

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.

Narcissism and the Confederate dead cannot be connected logically, or even historically; even were the connection an historical fact, they would not stand connected as art, for no one experiences raw history.

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.

Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.

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.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.