Few Poets Have Made A More Interesting

The Ways We Miss Our Lives Are Life.

If We Meet An Honest And Intelligent Politician, A Dozen, A Hundred, We Say They Aren't Like Politicians At All, And Our Category Of Politicians Stays Unchanged; We Know What Politicians Are Like.

Most Poets, Most Good Poets Even, No Longer Have The Heart To Write About What Is Most Terrible In The World Of The Present: The Bombs Waiting Beside The Rockets, The Hundreds Of Millions Staring Into The Temporary Shelter Of Their Television Sets, The Decline Of The West That Seems Less A Decline Than The Fall Preceding An Explosion.

Except From The Americans—but Every Pearl Has Its Oyster.

Our Universities Should Produce Good Criticism; They Do Not Or, At Best, They Do So Only As Federal Prisons Produce Counterfeit Money: A Few Hardened Prisoners Are More Or Less Surreptitiously Continuing Their Real Vocations.