88

This meant in the long run he was rather isolated.

p 77

"Never write from your head, write from your cock. Don't force yourself mentally unless the original impulse comes from the guts and gives you a nice warm feeling up the spine, it is cerebral and bogus... Much poetry to-day is of this kind, emotional frigging." p 118

"To achieve anything today, an artist has to develop a conscious strictness in respect of time which in former ages might have seemed neurotic and selfish, for he must never forget that he is living in a state of siege." p 279

The one unfallible symptom of greatness is the capacity for double focus. [great men] know that all absolutes are heretical but that one can only

89

act in a given circumstance by assuming one... they are skeptical about human nature but not despairing; they know that they are weak but not helpless: perfection is helpless but one can be or do better or worse." p 287

"Here (America) it is impossible to deceive oneself. ... America may break one completely but the best of which one is capable is more likely to be drawn out of here than anywhere else."

p 289

"... sex is the least controllable by the personality.

p 299

"In so much 'serious' poetry I find an element of 'theatre,' of exaggerated gesture and fuss, of indifference to the naked truth, which, as I get older,