It is out of fashion in these days to look backward rather than forward. About the only American given to it is some unreconstructed Southerner, who persists in his regard for a certain terrain, a certain history, and a certain inherited way of living.

And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

And if no Lethe flows beneath your casement, And when ten years have not brought full effacement, Philosophy was wrong, and you may meet.

But we moderns are impatient and destructive.

Now between the meanings of words and their sounds there is ordinarily no discoverable relation except one of accident; and it is therefore miraculous, to the mystic, when words which make sense can also make a uniform objective structure of accents and rhymes.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet.