Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.
Don't use such an expression as "dim lands _of peace_." It dulls the
image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the
writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the _adequate_
symbol.
Go in fear of abstractions. Don't retell in mediocre verse what has
already been done in good prose. Don't think any intelligent person is
going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the
unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition
into line lengths.
What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow.
Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of
music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least
as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends
on the art of music.
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency
either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it.
Don't allow "influence" to mean merely that you mop up the particular
decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to
admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed
babbling in his dispatches of "dove-gray" hills, or else it was
"pearl-pale," I can not remember.
Use either no ornament or good ornament.