The Safest Way To Avoid

If Poetry Were Nothing But Texture, [dylan] Thomas Would Be As Good As Any Poet Alive. The What Of His Poems Is Hardly Essential To Their Success, And The Best And Most Brilliantly Written Pieces Usually Say Less Than The Worst.

One Whitman Is Miracle Enough, And When He Comes Again It Will Be The End Of The World.

Some Of Mr. Gregory's Poems Have Merely Appeared In The New Yorker ; Others Are New Yorker Poems: The Inclusive Topicality, The Informed And Casual Smartness, The Flat Fashionable Irony, Meaningless Because It Proceeds From A Frame Of Reference Whose Amorphous Superiority Is The Most Definite Thing About It They Are The Trademark Not Simply Of A Magazine But Of A Class.

Both In Verse And In Prose [karl] Shapiro Loves, Partly Out Of Indignation And Partly Out Of Sheer Mischievousness, To Tell The Naked Truths Or Half-truths Or Quarter-truths That Will Make Anybody's Hair Stand On End; He Is Always Crying: "but He Hasn't Any Clothes On!" About An Emperor Who Is Half The Time Surprisingly Well-dressed.

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.