Or he can work it out as a metrical and formal exercise, but he will be disappointed in its content. The New Year’s prospect fairly chills his daunting breast.

The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism – how should poetry escape?

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense – very far in excess of one-half of one per cent – into their otherwise sober documents.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness, which idea can never claim. An idea is derivative and tamed. The imageis in the natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours. We think we can lay hold of image and take it captive, but the docile captive is not the real image but only the idea, which is the image with its character beaten out of it.

God have mercy on the sinner Who must write with no dinner, No gravy and no grub, No pewter and no pub, No bellyand no bowels, Only consonants and vowels.

Would you ascend to Heaven and bodiless dwell? Or take your bodies honorless to Hell? In Heaven you have heard no marriage is, No white flesh tinder to your lecheries

Great lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones Infatuate of the flesh upon the bones; Stuprate, they rend each other when they kiss, The pieces kiss again, no end to this.

In all the good Greek of Plato I lack my roastbeef and potato. A better man was Aristotle, Pulling steady on the bottle.

I am a lady young in beauty waiting Until my truelove comes, and then we kiss.