The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish. - W. H. Auden

But round your image
there is no fog, and the Earth
can still astonish.

For the others, like me, there is only the flash
Of negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, one
Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass
To meet one’s madness

All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.