In Love As In Sport, The Amateur

Philosophy Is Antipoetic. Philosophize About Mankind And You Brush Aside Individual Uniqueness, Which A Poet Cannot Do Without Self-damage. Unless, For A Start, He Has A Strong Personal Rhythm To Vary His Metrics, He Is Nothing. Poets Mistrust Philosophy. They Know That Once The Heads Are Counted, Each Owner Of A Head Loses His Personal Identify And Becomes A Number In Some Government Scheme: If Not As A Slave Or Serf, At Least As A Party To The Device Of Majority Voting, Which Smothers Personal Views.

I Made No More Protests. What Was The Use Of Struggling Against Fate

So When I'm Killed, Don't Wait For Me, Walking The Dim Corridor; In Heaven Or Hell, Don't Wait For Me, Or You Must Wait For Evermore. You'll Find Me Buried, Living-dead In These Verses That You've Read.

Hardly One Soldier In A Hundred Was Inspired By Religious Feeling Of Even The Crudest Kind. It Would Have Been Difficult To Remain Religious In The Trenches Even If One Had Survived The Irreligion Of The Training Battalion At Home.

Abstract Reason, Formerly The Servant Of Practical Human Reasons, Has Everywhere Become Its Master, And Denies Poetry Any Excuse For Existence. Though Philosophers Like To Define Poetry As Irrational Fancy, For Us It Is Practical, Humorous, Reasonable Way Of Being Ourselves. Of Never Acquiescing In A Fraud; Of Never Accepting The Secondary-rate In Poetry, Painting, Music, Love, Friends. Of Safeguarding Our Poetic Institutions Against The Encroachments Of Mechanized, Insensate, Inhumane, Abstract Rationality.