Macmillan's rejection had left him very downcast... Patrick Swift was invited to peruse the contents and decided that the poems should be published.

I dabbled in verse and it became my life

It is impossible to read the daily press without being diverted from reality. You are full of enthusiasm for the eternal verities - life is worth living, and then out of sinful curiosity you open a newspaper. You are disillusioned and wrecked.

Actors are loved because they are unoriginal. Actors stick to their script. The unoriginal man is loved by the mediocrity because this kind of artistic expression is something to which the merest five-eighth can climb.

A man is original when he speaks the truth that has always been known to all good men.

We are not alone in our loneliness, others have been here and known griefs we thought our special own.

What appears in newspapers is often new but seldom true.