"The academic mind can eat away the very basis of its own assurance ... produce contortions when it tries to bend over backward ... allow itself to be dismayed by the picture it has created of relentless historical process."

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The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.

— Robert Graves