The Real War Poets Are Always War

First One Gets Works Of Art, Then Criticism Of Them, Then Criticism Of The Criticism, And, Finally, A Book On The Literary Situation , A Book Which Tells You All About Writers, Critics, Publishing, Paperbacked Books, The Tendencies Of The (literary) Time, What Sells And How Much, What Writers Wear And Drink And Want, What Their Wives Wear And Drink And Want, And So On.

Goethe Said, "the Author Whom A Lexicon Can Keep Up With Is Worth Nothing"; Somerset Maugham Says That The Finest Compliment He Ever Received Was A Letter In Which One Of His Readers Said: "i Read Your Novel Without Having To Look Up A Single Word In The Dictionary." These Writers, Plainly, Lived In Different Worlds.

Our Quarrels With The World Are Like Our Quarrels With God: No Matter How Right We Are, We Are Wrong.

When You Begin To Read A Poem You Are Entering A Foreign Country Whose Laws And Language And Life Are A Kind Of Translation Of Your Own; But To Accept It Because Its Stews Taste Exactly Like Your Old Mother's Hash, Or To Reject It Because The Owl-headed Goddess Of Wisdom In Its Temple Is Fatter Than The Statue Of Liberty, Is An Equal Mark Of That Want Of Imagination, That Inaccessibility To Experience, Of Which Each Of Us Who Dies A Natural Death Will Die.

Robert Frost Says In A Piece Of Homely Doggerel That He Has Hoped Wisdom Could Be Not Only Attic But Laconic, Boeotian Even - "at Least Not Systematic"; But How Systematically Frostian The Worst Of His Later Poems Are! His Good Poems Are The Best Refutation Of, The Most Damning Comment On, His Bad: His Complete Poems Have The Air Of Being Able To Educate Any Faithful Reader Into Tearing Out A Third Of The Pages, Reading A Third, And Practically Wearing Out The Rest.