The usual bad poem in somebody’s Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, b… - Randall Jarrell

The round-square may be impossible, but we believe in it because it is impossible. [E.E.] Cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, illegal syntactical devices: his misuse of parts of speech, his use of negative prefixes, his word-coining, his systematic relation of words that grammar and syntax don’t permit us to relate — all this makes him a magical bootlegger or moonshiner of language, one who intoxicates us on a clear liquor no government has legalized with its stamp.

Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not — or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.

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 deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form.