There's No Money In Poetry, But Then

When I'm Killed, Don't Think Of Me Buried There In Cambrin Wood, Nor As In Zion Think Of Me With The Intolerable Good. And There's One Thing That I Know Well, I'm Damned If I'll Be Damned To Hell!

Mythology Is The Study Of Whatever Religious Or Heroic Legends Are So Foreign To A Student's Experience That He Cannot Believe Them To Be True. . . . Myth Has Two Main Functions. The First Is To Answer The Sort Of Awkward Questions That Children Ask, Such As: 'who Made The World? How Will It End? Who Was The First Man? Where Do Souls Go After Death?'. . . . The Second Function Of Myth Is To Justify An Existing Social System And Account For Traditional Rites And Customs.

The Poet's First Rule Must Be Never To Bore His Readers; And His Best Way Of Keeping This Rule Is Never To Bore Himself-which, Of Course, Means To Write Only When He Has Something Urgent To Say.

The Difference Between Prose Logic And Poetic Thought Is Simple. The Logician Uses Words As A Builder Uses Bricks, For The Unemotional Deadness Of His Academic Prose; And Is Always Coining Newer, Deader Words With A Natural Preference For Greek Formations. The Poet Avoids The Entire Vocabulary Of Logic Unless For Satiric Purposes, And Treats Words As Living Creatures With A Preference For Those With Long Emotional Histories Dating From Mediaeval Times. Poetry At Its Purest Is, Indeed, A Defiance Of Logic.

I Revise The Manuscript Till I Can't Read It Any Longer, Then I Get Somebody To Type It. Then I Revise The Typing. Then It's Retyped Again. Then There's A Third Typing, Which Is The Final One. Nothing Should Then Remain That Offends The Eye.