I dug the words out of my heart, squeezed the rhymes out of my brain, forced the missing syllables out of their hiding-places in the dictionary.

May I never again know such travail of the spirit as I endured during the fevered days when I was engaged on the poem.

It was not as if I wanted to say that snow was white or grass was green.

I could do that without a dictionary.

It was a question now of the loftiest sentiments, of the most abstract truths, the names of which were very new in my vocabulary.