One Gets To The Heart Of The

Philosophy Is Antipoetic. Philosophize About Mankind And You Brush Aside Individual Uniqueness, Which A Poet Cannot Do Without Self-damage. Unless, For A Start, He Has A Strong Personal Rhythm To Vary His Metrics, He Is Nothing. Poets Mistrust Philosophy. They Know That Once The Heads Are Counted, Each Owner Of A Head Loses His Personal Identify And Becomes A Number In Some Government Scheme: If Not As A Slave Or Serf, At Least As A Party To The Device Of Majority Voting, Which Smothers Personal Views.

Nine-tenths Of English Poetic Literature Is The Result Either Of Vulgar Careerism Or Of A Poet Trying To Keep His Hand In. Most Poets Are Dead By Their Late Twenties.

If I Thought That Any Poem Of Mine Could Have Been Written By Anyone Else, Either A Contemporary Or A Forerunner, I Should Suppress It With A Blush; And I Should Do The Same If I Ever Found I Were Imitating Myself. Every Poem Should Be New, Unexpected, Inimitable, And Incapable Of Being Parodied.

Abstract Reason, Formerly The Servant Of Practical Human Reasons, Has Everywhere Become Its Master, And Denies Poetry Any Excuse For Existence. Though Philosophers Like To Define Poetry As Irrational Fancy, For Us It Is Practical, Humorous, Reasonable Way Of Being Ourselves. Of Never Acquiescing In A Fraud; Of Never Accepting The Secondary-rate In Poetry, Painting, Music, Love, Friends. Of Safeguarding Our Poetic Institutions Against The Encroachments Of Mechanized, Insensate, Inhumane, Abstract Rationality.

To Know Only One Thing Well Is To Have A Barbaric Mind: Civilization Implies The Graceful Relation Of All Varieties Of Experience To A Central Humane System Of Thought. The Present Age Is Peculiarly Barbaric: Introduce, Say, A Hebrew Scholar To An Ichthyologist Or An Authority On Danish Place Names And The Pair Of Them Would Have No Single Topic In Common But The Weather Or The War (if There Happened To Be A War In Progress, Which Is Usual In This Barbaric Age).