Don’t imagine that printing a poem as prose makes it prose. A musical masterpiece may be distorted by unrhythmic playing, yet the composer’s rhythm remains intact in the score.
Don’t object to conceptions in poetry that you might find striking and powerful in bronze or plaster. “The Hog Butcher of the World” is one picturesque attitude of Chicago.... Is the truth unbearable? One may still love Chicago in spite of its dirty face.
Don’t try to establish even a distant kinship between poetry and ethics. The relation is illicit.
Don’t tell the poet what he must, or must not, write about—he doesn’t hear you.
Don’t be tedious.
Don’t take ten times as much space as the poet to prove that he is a bad poet. Your sin against the public is more grievous, and your art less, than his.
Don’t make up your review from the publisher’s advance notice. The poet might like to know what you think about his work—not what he told the publisher to tell you.
Don’t expect a poet to punch a time-clock, or record only the emotions of his fellow townspeople.
Don’t limit a poet to primary emotions, or find decadence in a refinement that may exceed your own.
Don’t fancy that brutality is strength, or delicacy weakness.