"Taste, discretion, and decision have, one likes to think, been exercised so as to manifest the variety of an age's poems, the felicitous heterogeneity, the diverting diversity, and the buoyant resistance which a world of poems will always put up even to the best literary historian's summary justice."

"[T]o travesty or to calumniate the Victorians is still such a cheap holiday."

"Inerrancy about one's own powers is not a mark of the Victorian poets, nor even is a simple prudence about not over-reaching or over-archaizing. The Victorian poetaster over 'weens'."

"Great Britain was Victorian for two-thirds of a century. Things changed and counterchanged; even the Queen often proved a surprise, though it may be thought that she was a surprise like a Browning character, by being even more herself than one would ever have anticipated."

"Any anthologist of the unparagoned achievement that is English poetry must enjoy the pleasure, privilege, and responsibility of being for a while the master of its ceremonies. Or of being, at any rate, in the rueful Americanism, kinda humble and kinda proud."

"English poetry – having a life of its own – is forever being supplemented, complemented, culled, and found afresh. The anthologist had better not repine at the thought of his or her future departure."

"[M]ost of us are not good at appreciating the poetry of those appreciably younger than we are."

"[I]t is characteristic of true simplicity that there may radiate from its utmost directness a good many glinting things."

"[The test of value in a work of art is] whether or not it continues to repay attention."