Habits Are Happiness Of A Sort...

When You're Young You Try To Be Methodical And Philosophical, But Reality Keeps Breaking In.

In Heaven All Reviews Will Be Favorable; Here On Earth, The Publisher Realizes, Plausibility Demands An Occasional Bad One, Some Convincing Lump In All That Leaven, And He Accepts It Somewhat As A Theologian Accepts Evil.

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.

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.

I Don't Need To Praise Anything So Justly Famous As Frost's Observation Of And Empathy With Everything In Nature From A Hornet To A Hillside; And He Has Observed His Own Nature, One Person's Random Or Consequential Chains Of Thoughts And Feelings And Perceptions, Quite As Well. (and This Person, In The Poems, Is Not The "alienated Artist" Cut Off From Everybody Who Isn't, Yum-yum, Another Alienated Artist; He Is Someone Like Normal People Only More So - A Normal Person In The Less Common And More Important Sense Of Normal.)