One Of The Most Obvious

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.

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.

Some Of Mr. Gregory's Poems Have Merely Appeared In The New Yorker ; Others Are New Yorker Poems: The Inclusive Topicality, The Informed And Casual Smartness, The Flat Fashionable Irony, Meaningless Because It Proceeds From A Frame Of Reference Whose Amorphous Superiority Is The Most Definite Thing About It They Are The Trademark Not Simply Of A Magazine But Of A Class.

A Poet Is A Man Who Manages, In A Lifetime Of Standing Out In Thunderstorms, To Be Struck By Lightning Five Or Six Times.

Habits Are Happiness Of A Sort...