We Learn What Poetry Is - If

O Lord, Deliver Me From The Man Of Excellent Intention And Impure Heart: For The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, And Desperately Wicked.

In A World Of Fugitives The One Who Stays Home Will Seem To Be Running Away

One Thing You Cannot Know: The Sudden Extinction Of Every Alternative, The Unexpected Crash Of The Iron Cataract. You Do Not Know What Hope Is, Until You Have Lost It. You Only Know What It Is Not To Hope: You Do Not Know What It Is To Have Hope Taken From You Or To Fling It Away, To Join The Legion Of The Hopeless Unrecognized By Other Men, Though Sometimes By Each Other.

We Have All Our Private Terrors, Our Particular Shadows, Our Secret Fears. We Are Afraid In A Fear Which We Cannot Face, Which None Understands, And Our Hearts Are Torn From Us, Our Brains Unskinned Like The Layers Of An Onion, Ourselves The Last.

As Things Are, And As Fundamentally They Must Always Be, Poetry Is Not A Career, But A Mug's Game. No Honest Poet Can Ever Feel Quite Sure Of The Permanent Value Of What He Has Written: He May Have Wasted His Time And Messed Up His Life For Nothing.