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

If my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to helplessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy breakfast — and as someone said, “If you’re going to hang me, you mustn’t expect to be able to intimidate me into sparing your feelings during the execution.”

If Benton had had an administration building with pillars it could have carved over the pillars: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you guilty.

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.