Whether They Write Poems Or

Goethe Said That The Worst Thing In Art Is Technical Facility Accompanied By Triteness. Many An Artist, Like God, Has Never Needed To Think Twice About Anything. His Works Are The Mad Scene From Giselle , On Ice Skates: He Weeps, Pulls Out His Hair Holding His Wrists Like Lifar And Tells You What Life Is, All At A Gliding Forty Miles An Hour.

Imagism Was A Reductio Ad Absurdum Of One Or Two Tendencies Of Romanticism, Such A Beautifully And Finally Absurd One That It Is Hard To Believe It Existed As Anything But A Logical Construction; And What Imagist Found It Possible To Go On Writing Imagist Poetry? A Number Of Poets Have Stopped Writing Entirely; Others, Like Recurring Decimals, Repeat The Novelties They Commeced With, Each Time Less Valuably Than Before. And There Are Surrealist Poetry, And Political Poetry, And All The Othe Refuges Of The Indigent.

The Novel Is A Prose Narrative Of Some Length That Has Something Wrong With It.

Poetry Is A Bad Medium For Philosophy. Everything In The Philosophical Poem Has To Satisfy Irreconcilable Requirements: For Instance, The Last Demand That We Should Make Of Philosophy (that It Be Interesting) Is The First We Make Of A Poem; The Philosophical Poet Has An Elevated And Methodical, But Forlorn And Absurd Air As He Works Away At His Flying Tank, His Sewing-machine That Also Plays The Piano.

Reality Is What We Want It To Be Or What We Do Not Want It To Be, But It Is Not Our Wanting Or Our Not Wanting That Makes It So.