“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Tip: press → for another quote, C to copy, S to share.
The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
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.
All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths they become facts, or at best, part of the public character or at worst, catchwords.