Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence. - Randall Jarrell

...one straggles gracelessly through a wilderness of common sense. It is an experience for which the reader of modern criticism is unprepared: in that jungle through which one wanders, with its misshapen and extravagant and cannibalistic growths, bent double with fruit and tentacles, disquieting with their rank eccentric life, one comes surprisingly on something so palely healthy: a decorous plant, without thorns or flowers, rootless in the thin sand of the drawing room.

...and then President Robbins began to speak. After two sentences one realized once more that President Robbins was an extraordinary speaker, a speaker of a — one says an almost extinct school, but how does one say the opposite? a not-yet-evolved school? He did something so logical that it is impossibe that no one else should have thought of it, yet no one has. President Robbins crooned his speeches. His voice not only took you into his confidence, it laid a fire for you and put your slippers by it and then went into the other room to get into something more comfortable. It was a Compromising voice.

One thinks with awe and longing of this real and extraordinary popularity of hers [Edna St. Vincent Millay’s]: if there were some poet — Frost, Stevens, Eliot — whom people still read in canoes!