A Poem Is, So To

Pain Comes From The Darkness. And We Call It Wisdom. It Is Pain.

First One Gets Works Of Art, Then Criticism Of Them, Then Criticism Of The Criticism, And, Finally, A Book On The Literary Situation , A Book Which Tells You All About Writers, Critics, Publishing, Paperbacked Books, The Tendencies Of The (literary) Time, What Sells And How Much, What Writers Wear And Drink And Want, What Their Wives Wear And Drink And Want, And So On.

Our Quarrels With The World Are Like Our Quarrels With God: No Matter How Right We Are, We Are Wrong.

Nowadays When A Poet With One Privately Printed Book Can Have His Next Three Years Taken Care Of By A Guggenheim Fellowship, A Kenyon Review Fellowship, And The Prix De Rome, It Is Hard To Remember What Chances The Poet Took In That Small-town World, How Precariously Hand-to-mouth His Existence Was. And Yet In One Way The Old Days Were Better; [vachel] Lindsay After A While, By Luck And Skill, Got Far More Readers Than Any Poet Could Get Today.

If We Were In The Habit Of Reading Poets Their Obscurity Would Not Matter; And, Once We Are Out Of The Habit, Their Clarity Does Not Help.