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

What Miss Moore’s best poetry does, I can say best in her words: it “comes into and steadies the soul,” so that the reader feels himself “a life prisoner, but reconciled.”

In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil.

...Stevens does not think of inspiration (or whatever you want to call it) as a condition of composition. He too is waiting for the spark from heaven to fall — poets have no choice about this — but he waits writing; and this — other things being equal, when it’s possible, if it’s possible — is the best way for a poet to wait.