Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.
For, dear me, why abandon a belief, Merely because it ceases to be true, Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt, It will turn true again, for so it goes.
The style is the man. Rather say the style is the way the man takes himself; and to be at all charming or even bearable, the way is almost rigidly prescribed. If it is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humor. If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness. No other way will do.
Trust him to have his bitter politics
Against his unacquaintances the rich
Who sleep in houses of their own, though mortgaged.
Conservatives, they don't know what to save.