Habits Are Happiness Of A

Underneath All His Writing There Is The Settled Determination To Use Certain Words, To Take Certain Attitudes, To Produce A Certain Atmosphere; What He Is Seeing Or Thinking Or Feeling Has Hardly Any Influence On The Way He Writes. The Reader Can Reply, Ironically, "that's What It Means To Have A Style"; But Few People Have So Much Of One, Or One So Obdurate That You Can Say Of It, "it Is A Style That No Subject Can Change.

From My Mother's Sleep I Fell Into The State, And I Hunched In Its Belly Till My Wet Fur Froze. Six Miles From Earth, Loosed From The Dream Of Life, I Woke To Black Flak And The Nightmare Fighters. When I Died They Washed Me Out Of The Turret With A Hose.

There Are Some Good Things And Some Fantastic Ones In Auden's Early Attitude; If The Reader Calls It A Muddle I Shall Acquiesce, With The Remark That The Later Position Might Be Considered A More Rarefied Muddle. But Poets Rather Specialize In Muddles And I Have No Doubt Which Of The Muddles Was Better For Auden's Poetry: One Was Fertile And Usable, The Other Decidedly Is Not. Auden Sometimes Seems To Be Saying With Henry Clay, "i Had Rather Be Right Than Poetry"; But I Am Not Sure, Then, That He Is Either.

Whether They Write Poems Or Don't Write Poems, Poets Are Best.

I Shook Myself; I Was Dreaming. As I Went To Bed The Words Of The Eighth-grade Class's Teacher, When The Class Got To Evangeline , Kept Echoing In My Ears: "we're Coming To A Long Poem Now, Boys And Girls. Now Don't Be Babies And Start Counting The Pages." I Lay There Like A Baby, Counting The Pages Over And Over, Counting The Pages.