I Think That One Possible Definition Of

Few Poets Have Made A More Interesting Rhetoric Out Of Just Fooling Around: Turning Things Upside Down, Looking At Them From Under The Sofa, Considering Them (and Their Observer) Curiously Enough To Make The Reader Protest, "that Were To Consider It Too Curiously.

Art Matters Not Merely Because It Is The Most Magnificent Ornament And The Most Nearly Unfailing Occupation Of Our Lives, But Because It Is Life Itself.

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.

Habits Are Happiness Of A Sort...

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.