...if sometimes we are bogged down in lines full of “corybulous”, “hypogeum”, “plangent”, “irrefragably”, “glozening”, “tellurian”, “conclamant”, som… - Randall Jarrell

The greatest American industry — why has no one ever said so? — is the industry of using words. We pay tens of millions of people to spend their lives lying to us, or telling us the truth, or supplying us with a nourishing medicinal compound of the two. All of us are living in the middle of a dark wood — a bright Technicolored forest — of words, words, words. It is a forest in which the wind is never still: there isn’t a tree in the forest that is not, for every moment of its life and our lives, persuading or ordering or seducing or overawing us into buying this, believing that, voting for the other.

...modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can’t get it, let him eat Browning...

The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything — I am being sympathetic, not satiric — for the very best reasons.