There are several more careers more engaging to follow than that of poetry. But the circumstances of one's birth, the conduct of one's parents, the current economic structure of society, and a thousand other local factors have as much or more to say about successions to such occupations, the naive volitions of the poet to the contrary.

Your primary presumption that The Bridge was proffered as an epic has no substantial foundation. You know quite well that I doubt that our present stage of cultural development is so ordered yet as to provide the means or method for such an organic manifestation as that.

Let my lusts be my ruin, then, since all else is a fake and a mockery.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.

Goodbye, everybody! (Suicide note)

The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exist any real links between that past and a future worthy of it.