Life - life - let there be life!

Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade

It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal.

This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.

And lo, the Hospital, gray, quiet, old, Where life and death like friendly chafferers meet.

Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides.