“Far from his illnessThe wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;By mourning tonguesThe death of the poet was kept from his poems.”

“no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.”

“In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.”

“A.E.Housman'No one, not even Cambridge was to blame(Blame if you like the human situation):Heart-injured in North London, he becameThe Latin Scholar of his generation.Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;Food was his public love, his private lustSomething to do with violence and the poor.In savage foot-notes on unjust editionsHe timidly attacked the life he led,And put the money of his feelings onThe uncritical relations of the dead,Where only geographical divisionsParted the coarse hanged soldier from the don.”

“It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.”

“Fashion and snobbery are also valuable as a defense against literary indigestion. Regardless of their quality, it is always better to read a few books carefully than skim through many, and, short of a personal taste which cannot be formed overnight, snobbery is as good a principle of limitation as any other.I am eternally grateful, for example, to the musical fashion of my youth which prevented me from listening to Italian Opera until I was over thirty, by which age I was capable of really appreciating a world so beautiful and so challenging to my cultural heritage.”

“The Ogre does what ogres can,Deeds quite impossible for Man,But one prize is beyond his reach:The Ogre cannot master speech.About a subjugated plain,Among its desperate and slain,The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,While drivel gushes from his lips.”