If you rank me with the lyric poets, my exalted head shall strike the stars.
[Lat., Quod si me lyricis vatibus inseris,
Sublimi feriam sidera vertice.]
Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.
In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.