Love is a universal migraine. A bright stain on the vision, Blotting out reason.

You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.

As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.

The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.