It Is Always Hard For Poets To

Pain Comes From The Darkness. And We Call It Wisdom. It Is Pain.

A Successful Poem Says What A Poet Wants To Say, And More, With Particular Finality. The Remarks He Makes About His Poems Are Incidental When The Poem Is Good, Or Embarrassing Or Absurd When It Is Bad And He Is Not Permitted To Say How The Good Poem Is Good, And May Never Know How The Bad Poem Is Bad. It Is Better To Write About Other People's Poetry.

I Shook Myself; I Was Dreaming. As I Went To Bed The Words Of The Eighth-grade Class's Teacher, When The Class Got To Evangeline , Kept Echoing In My Ears: "we're Coming To A Long Poem Now, Boys And Girls. Now Don't Be Babies And Start Counting The Pages." I Lay There Like A Baby, Counting The Pages Over And Over, Counting The Pages.

A Poem Is, So To Speak, A Way Of Making You Forget How You Wrote It.

A Correct Answer Is Like An Affectionate Kiss, Goethe Said; A Correct Answer, Gertrude Would Have Said, Is Like A Slap In The Face.