Whether They Write Poems Or Don't Write

You Give Me The Feeling That The Universe Was Made By Something More Than Human For Something Less Than Human. But I Identify Myself, As Always, With Something That There's Something Wrong With, With Something Human.

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

A Correct Answer Is Like An Affectionate Kiss, Goethe Said; A Correct Answer, Gertrude Would Have Said, Is Like A Slap In The Face.

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.

Underneath All His Writing There Is The Settled Determination To Use Certain Words, To Take Certain Attitudes, To Produce A Certain Atmosphere; What He Is Seeing Or Thinking Or Feeling Has Hardly Any Influence On The Way He Writes. The Reader Can Reply, Ironically, "that's What It Means To Have A Style"; But Few People Have So Much Of One, Or One So Obdurate That You Can Say Of It, "it Is A Style That No Subject Can Change.