Auden is able to set up a We (whom he identifies himself with — rejection loves company) in opposition to the enemy They... - Randall Jarrell

If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.

One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.

...one straggles gracelessly through a wilderness of common sense. It is an experience for which the reader of modern criticism is unprepared: in that jungle through which one wanders, with its misshapen and extravagant and cannibalistic growths, bent double with fruit and tentacles, disquieting with their rank eccentric life, one comes surprisingly on something so palely healthy: a decorous plant, without thorns or flowers, rootless in the thin sand of the drawing room.