We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

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.

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.

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.

Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.