This might read kind of choppy and that is my fault. These are my notes. This is only from the first 60 or 80 pages. It might seem like it's not alot, but I have read this book four or five times and wanted to write down its main ideas, which are essential to any poet.

"Writers have a definate social function exactly proportioned to their ability as writers.
Good writers keep the language efficient, articulate, and keep it clear. Language is the main means of human communication. If an animal's nervous system stops transmitting sensations, the animal atrophies. If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, a than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

The statesmen cannot govern, the scientist cannot participate his discoveries, men cannot agree on wise action without language. A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one launguage, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human communication and comprehension.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
This is mainly done in three ways: phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia. You use a word to throw an image on to the reader's imagination, or you charge it by sound, or you use groups of words to do this. Use the word in some special realtion to "usage", that is, to the kind of context in which the reader expects, or is accustomed, to find it.

A man can learn more about poetry by really knowing and examining a few of the best poems than by meandering about among a great many. A great deal of false teaching is due to the assumption that poems known to the critic are of necessity the best."

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