The motto of his [Robinson Jeffers’s] work is “More! More!” — but as Tolstoy says, “A wee bit omitted, overemphasized, or exaggerated in poetry, and … - Randall Jarrell

An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.

Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.

The poets of the last generation were extremely erudite, but their erudition was of the rather specialized type that passed as currency of the realm in a somewhat literary realm. About Darwin, Marx, Freud and Co., about all characteristically “scientific” or “modern” thinkers most of them concluded regretfully: “If they had not existed, it would not have been necessary to ignore them.” (Or deplore them.)