The Ways We Miss Our Lives Are

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.

There Are Some Good Things And Some Fantastic Ones In Auden's Early Attitude; If The Reader Calls It A Muddle I Shall Acquiesce, With The Remark That The Later Position Might Be Considered A More Rarefied Muddle. But Poets Rather Specialize In Muddles And I Have No Doubt Which Of The Muddles Was Better For Auden's Poetry: One Was Fertile And Usable, The Other Decidedly Is Not. Auden Sometimes Seems To Be Saying With Henry Clay, "i Had Rather Be Right Than Poetry"; But I Am Not Sure, Then, That He Is Either.

People Had Always Seemed To Gertrude Rather Like The Beasts In Animal Farm : All Equally Detestable, But Some More Equally Detestable Than Others.

From My Mother's Sleep I Fell Into The State, And I Hunched In Its Belly Till My Wet Fur Froze. Six Miles From Earth, Loosed From The Dream Of Life, I Woke To Black Flak And The Nightmare Fighters. When I Died They Washed Me Out Of The Turret With A Hose.

Our Universities Should Produce Good Criticism; They Do Not Or, At Best, They Do So Only As Federal Prisons Produce Counterfeit Money: A Few Hardened Prisoners Are More Or Less Surreptitiously Continuing Their Real Vocations.