My Old Teacher's Definition Of Poetry Is

My Thoughts Are Crowded With Death And It Draws So Oddly On The Sexual That I Am Confused To Be Attracted By, In Effect, My Own Annihilation.

I Had Assumed That I Would Age With All My Friends Growing Old Around Me, Dying Off Very Gradually One By One. And Here Was A Plague That Cut Them Off So Early.

I Was Reading The Poems Of Rochester. Rochester Made Himself Out To Be Bisexual, But I Think That Was Only To Shock. Most Of His Poetry Is Sexual, Even Pornographic.

I Work Best In Rhyme And Meter. I Was Most Confident Of Myself In That Way.

We Learned In The University To Consider Wordsworth And Keats As Romantics. They Were Only A Generation Apart, But Wordsworth Didn't Even Read Keats's Book When He Gave Him A Copy.