Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

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.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.

Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.

Time past and time future what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.

For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice.