Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
Everything seems an echo of something else.
Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."