Publicly, we are the self-indulgence others will abide.

Poetry aspires to the honesty of music.

The imagination belongs as much to philosophers as to poets. "We make ourselves pictures of the facts," said Wittgenstein; it is an act upon which "so much depends," Williams might add. "The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things," Stevens proposed, speaking, I suppose, as a poet. Would he grant, I wonder, that it operates, as it were, between the mind and the heart, and would therefore appear, to the philosopher, as the knowledge we carry in our hearts of the needs of others?

Wittgenstein imagined a philosopher who speaks only of things that can be thought, but in such an order that thinking itself, which is to say, the possibility of things, comes to the fore, thus presenting our concepts perspicuously.

We can now imagine a poet who speaks only of people who feel, always in a meter such that we feel them ourselves, which is to say, our need for people, our longing for others, is presented intensely as an emotion.

The purpose of a work of art is to reveal a truth that even the enemy should know.