The Ways We Miss Our Lives Are

When You Begin To Read A Poem You Are Entering A Foreign Country Whose Laws And Language And Life Are A Kind Of Translation Of Your Own; But To Accept It Because Its Stews Taste Exactly Like Your Old Mother's Hash, Or To Reject It Because The Owl-headed Goddess Of Wisdom In Its Temple Is Fatter Than The Statue Of Liberty, Is An Equal Mark Of That Want Of Imagination, That Inaccessibility To Experience, Of Which Each Of Us Who Dies A Natural Death Will Die.

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

The Novel Is A Prose Narrative Of Some Length That Has Something Wrong With It.

Robert Frost Says In A Piece Of Homely Doggerel That He Has Hoped Wisdom Could Be Not Only Attic But Laconic, Boeotian Even - "at Least Not Systematic"; But How Systematically Frostian The Worst Of His Later Poems Are! His Good Poems Are The Best Refutation Of, The Most Damning Comment On, His Bad: His Complete Poems Have The Air Of Being Able To Educate Any Faithful Reader Into Tearing Out A Third Of The Pages, Reading A Third, And Practically Wearing Out The Rest.

A Poem Is, So To Speak, A Way Of Making You Forget How You Wrote It.