The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
Abandoned
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.
Continuous eloquence wearies. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated. Continuity in everything is unpleasant. Cold is agreeable, that we may get warm.
As I grew older – collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five – poetry abandoned me.
The Spanish offered me their protection, and liberty to those who would fight for the cause of the kings. I accepted their offers, seeing myself entirely abandoned by my brethren, the French.
In 1595, by order of the Privy Council, the English armed services abandoned the longbow and fought with muskets for the next two centuries and more. Nobody is sure why.
Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.
At last I perceive that in revolutions the supreme power rests with the most abandoned.
I have a vast ‘bone pile’ of stillborn or abandoned poems along with jottings and wisps from the great beyond that I tend to scan. Sometimes that leads somewhere, and sometimes the Muse is just on sabbatical.