Word I Was In My Life Alone,

A Poem Begins With A Lump In The Throat; A Homesickness Or A Love Sickness. It Is A Reaching-out Toward Expression; An Effort To Find Fulfillment. A Complete Poem Is One Where An Emotion Has Found Its Thought And The Thought Has Found Words.

We Can Make A Little Order Where We Are, And Then The Big Sweep Of History On Which We Can Have No Effect Doesn't Overwhelm Us. We Do It With Colors, With A Garden, With The Furnishings Of A Room, Or With Sounds And Words. We Make A Little Form, And We Gain Composure.

We Disparage Reason. But All The Time It's What We're Most Concerned With. There's Will As Motor And There's Will As Brakes. Reason Is, I Suppose, The Steering Gear.

A Definite Purpose, Like Blinders On A Horse, Inevitably Narrows Its Possessor's Point Of View.

Keats Mourned That The Rainbow, Which As A Boy Had Been For Him A Magic Thing, Had Lost Its Glory Because The Physicists Had Found It Resulted Merely From The Refraction Of The Sunlight By The Raindrops. Yet Knowledge Of Its Causation Could Not Spoil The Rainbow For Me. I Am Sure That It Is Not Given To Man To Be Omniscient. There Will Always Be Something Left To Know, Something To Excite The Imagination Of The Poet And Those Attuned To The Great World In Which They Live (p. 64)