"More often the poem is the way the poet says he
feels when he can't find out what his real feelings
are." --Richard Hugo

"I had, when we first made our [Hermetic] society,
proposed for our consideration that whatever the
great poets had affirmed in their finest moments
was the nearest we could come to an authoritative
religion, and that their mythology, their spirit of
water and wind were but literal truth." --Yeats,
Autobiography

"Assassins find accomplices. Man's merit
Has found him three, the hawk, the hound, the ferret."
--Blunt

The wholeness of the dynamic aspect is the
hiddenness of the visible.

"After an age of necessity, truth, goodness, mechanism,
science, democracy, abstraction, peace, comes an age
of freedom, fiction, evil, kindred, art, aristocracy, particu-
larity, war. Has our age burned to its socket?" --Yeats,
A Vision (1925)

"Urge me no more: this airy mirth belongs
To better times: these times are not for songs.
...The Raven's dismall croaks; the midnight howls
Of empty Wolves, mixt with the screech of owls;
The nine sad knowls of a dull passing-Bell,
With the loud language of a nightly knell,
And horrid out-cries of revengèd crimes,
Joyn'd in a medley's musick for these times...
Till then, earth's Semiquaver, mirth, farewell."
--Francis Quarles, Emblems

"Mass-hypnotised, dinned drunken by the tireless
Mechanic repetition of the wireless..." --Roy Campbell,
Jungle Eclogue

"I do very much apprehend...that our Posterity will in
a few Years degenerate into a Race of Punnsters."
--Addison, The Spectator

Poets used to be the custodians of language; now it's
journalists whose style book scarcely extends past
punctuation & capitalization... Not surprisingly, when
we begin to try to think, we mistake our linguistic chaos
for philosophic chaos, whereas in truth we have barely
one or two ideas and not any profusion except of equally
clumsy ways to phrase them.