The Ways We Miss Our Lives Are

How Can We Expect Novelists To Be Moral, When Their Trade Forces Them To Treat Every End They Meet As No More Than An Imperfect Means To A Novel?

I Think Miss Moore Was Right To Cut "the Steeple-jack" - The Poem Seems Plainer And Clearer In Its Shortened State But She Has Cut Too Much... The Reader May Feel Like Saying, "let Her Do As She Pleases With The Poem; It's Hers, Isn't It?" No; It's Much Too Good A Poem For That, It Long Ago Became Everybody's, And We Can Protest Just As We Could If Donatello Cut Off David's Left Leg.

First One Gets Works Of Art, Then Criticism Of Them, Then Criticism Of The Criticism, And, Finally, A Book On The Literary Situation , A Book Which Tells You All About Writers, Critics, Publishing, Paperbacked Books, The Tendencies Of The (literary) Time, What Sells And How Much, What Writers Wear And Drink And Want, What Their Wives Wear And Drink And Want, And So On.

Imagism Was A Reductio Ad Absurdum Of One Or Two Tendencies Of Romanticism, Such A Beautifully And Finally Absurd One That It Is Hard To Believe It Existed As Anything But A Logical Construction; And What Imagist Found It Possible To Go On Writing Imagist Poetry? A Number Of Poets Have Stopped Writing Entirely; Others, Like Recurring Decimals, Repeat The Novelties They Commeced With, Each Time Less Valuably Than Before. And There Are Surrealist Poetry, And Political Poetry, And All The Othe Refuges Of The Indigent.

When General Eisenhower Defined An Intellectual As "a Man Who Takes More Words Than Is Necessary To Tell More Than He Knows", He Was Speaking Not As A Republican But As An American.