There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

Men expect too much, do too little.

Narcissism and the Confederate dead cannot be connected logically, or even historically; even were the connection an historical fact, they would not stand connected as art, for no one experiences raw history.

Dramatic experience is not logical; it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.

For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it came from.

But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.

Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.

Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.

Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.

Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.

The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

The Spring I seek is in a new face only.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.

According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.