The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.

A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of government as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by government. Somewhere in between and In gradations is the group that has the sense that gov't exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.

We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.