If Wishes Were Stories, Beggars Would Read.

If My Tone Is Mocking, The Tone Of Someone Accustomed To Helplessness, This Is Natural: The Poet Is A Condemned Man For Whom The State Will Not Even Buy Breakfast And As Someone Said, "if You're Going To Hang Me, You Mustn't Expect To Be Able To Intimidate Me Into Sparing Your Feelings During The Execution."

Pain Comes From The Darkness. And We Call It Wisdom. It Is Pain.

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.

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

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.