Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the … - Randall Jarrell

People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?... The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it.

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.

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.”