I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire.

He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.