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.

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

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.

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.

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

The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!

Among friends one has the privilege of saying nothing; the civility consists in the assumption that one's silence will be civilly understood. I can imagine a small gathering of friends who say nothing all evening: they recoil from saying anything that the others don't want to hear; and their silence would be the subtlest courtesy.