We Are All So To Speak Intellectuals

We Are All So To Speak Intellectuals About Something.

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."

In Heaven All Reviews Will Be Favorable; Here On Earth, The Publisher Realizes, Plausibility Demands An Occasional Bad One, Some Convincing Lump In All That Leaven, And He Accepts It Somewhat As A Theologian Accepts Evil.

Most Works Of Art Are, Necessarily, Bad...; One Suffers Through The Many For The Few.

We Read Our Mail And Counted Up Our Missions In Bombers Named For Girls, We Burned The Cities We Had Learned About In School Till Our Lives Wore Out; Our Bodies Lay Among The People We Had Killed And Never Seen. When We Lasted Long Enough They Gave Us Medals; When We Died They Said, "our Casualties Were Low." They Said, "here Are The Maps"; We Burned The Cities.