We Can't Tell Our Life From Our

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

An Author Frequently Chooses Solemn Or Overwhelming Subjects To Write About; He Is So Impressed At Writing About Life And Death That He Does Not Notice That He Is Saying Nothing Of The Slightest Importance About Either.

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?

If You Never Look Just Wrong To Your Contemporaries You Will Never Look Just Right To Posterity - Every Writer Has To Try To Be, To Some Extent, Sometimes, A Law Unto Himself.

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.