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 pris… - Randall Jarrell

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.

An intelligent man said that the world felt Napoleon as a weight, and that when he died it would give a great oof of relief. This is just as true of Byron, or of such Byrons of their days as Kipling and Hemingway: after a generation or two the world is tired of being their pedestal, shakes them of with an oof, and then — hoisting onto its back a new world-figure — feels the penetrating satisfaction of having made a mistake all its own.

The Author to the Reader I’ve read that Luther said (it’s come to me So often that I’ve made it into meter): And even if the world should end tomorrow I still would plant my little apple-tree. Here, reader, is my little apple-tree.