We know from many experiences that this is what the work of art does: its life — in which we have shared the alien existences both of this world and … - Randall Jarrell

New Directions is a reviewer’s nightmare; it’s enough punishment to read it all, without writing about it too.

The writer does not get from his work as he writes and reads it the same aesthetic shock that the reader does; and since the writer is so accustomed to reading other stories, and having them produce a decided effect upon him, he is disquieted at not being equally affected by his own.

The weight and concentration of the poems fall upon things (and those great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-pastable plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the objects of the sagas — the sword that snaps, the man looking at his lopped-off leg and saying, “That was a good stroke.”