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

...a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it...

If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say that they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politician stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.

We read our mail and counted up our missions — In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school — Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among The people we had killed and never seen. When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; When we died they said, "Our casualties were low." They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities.