Fading, Fading: Strength Beyond Hope And Despair

We Must Believe That "emotion Recollected In Tranquillity" Is An Inexact Formula. For It Is Neither Emotion, Nor Recollection, Nor Without Distortion Of Meaning, Tranquillity. It Is A Concentration, And A New Thing Resulting From The Concentration Of A Very Great Number Of Experiences Which To The Practical And Active Person Would Not Seem To Be Experiences At All; It Is A Concentration Which Does Not Happen Consciously Or Of Deliberation. These Experiences Are Not "recollected" And They Finally Unite In An Atmosphere Which Is "tranquil" Only In That It Is A Passive Attending Upon The Event.

In Spite Of All The Dishonour, The Broken Standards, The Broken Lives, The Broken Faith In One Place Or Another, There Was Something Left That Was More Than The Tales Of Old Men On Winter Evenings.

In My Beginning Is My End.

We Know Too Much, And Are Convinced Of Too Little. Our Literature Is A Substitute For Religion, And So Is Our Religion.

As Things Are, And As Fundamentally They Must Always Be, Poetry Is Not A Career, But A Mug's Game. No Honest Poet Can Ever Feel Quite Sure Of The Permanent Value Of What He Has Written: He May Have Wasted His Time And Messed Up His Life For Nothing.