We Are All So To Speak Intellectuals

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.

Modern" Poetry Is, Essentially, An Extension Of Romanticism; It Is What Romantic Poetry Wishes Or Finds It Necessary To Become. It Is The End Product Of Romanticism, All Past And No Future; It Is Impossible To Go Further By Any Extrapolation Of The Process By Which We Have Arrived, And Certainly It Is Impossible To Remain Where We Are Who Could Endure A Century Of Transition ?

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.

We Always Tend To Distrust Geniuses About Genius, As If What They Say Didn't Arouse Much Empathy In Us, Or As If We Were Waiting Till Some More Reliable Source Of Information Came Along...

One Of The Most Puzzling Things About A Novel Is That "the Way It Really Was" Half The Time Is, And Half The Time Isn't, The Way It Ought To Be In The Novel.