No God Save Self, That

How Shall We Praise The Magnificence Of The Dead, The Great Man Humbled, The Haughty Brought To Dust?

Music I Heard With You Was More Than Music, And Bread I Broke With You Was More Than Bread. Now That I Am Without You, All Is Desolate; All That Was Once So Beautiful Is Dead.

I Think It's Very Useful To Be Insulated From Your Surrounds, Because It Gives You Your Inviolate Privacy, Without Pressures, So That You Can Just Be Yourself.

You Know, Without My Telling You, How Sometimes A Word Or Name Eludes You, And You Seek It Through Running Ghosts Of Shadow -- Leaping At It, Lying In Wait For It To Spring Upon It, Spreading Faint Snares For It Of Sense Or Sound: Until, Of A Sudden, As If In A Phantom Forest, You Hear It, See It Flash Among The Branches, And Scarcely Knowing How, Suddenly Have It.

I Compelled Myself All Through To Write An Exercise In Verse, In A Different Form, Every Day Of The Year. I Turned Out My Page Every Day, Of Some Sort - I Mean I Didn't Give A Damn About The Meaning, I Just Wanted To Master The Form - All The Way From Free Verse, Walt Whitman, To The Most Elaborate Of Villanelles And Ballad Forms. Very Good Training. I've Always Told Everybody Who Has Ever Come To Me That I Thought That Was The First Thing To Do.