Children S Authors

"I think Miss Moore was right to cut “The Steeple-Jack” — the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state — but she has cut too much... The reader may feel like saying, “Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it’s hers, isn’t it?” No; it’s much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody’s, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David’s left leg."

"A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry is a standard Oscar Williams production... ...the book has the merit of containing a considerably larger selection of Oscar Williams’s poems than I have seen in any other anthology. There are nine of his poems — and five of Hardy’s. It takes a lot of courage to like your own poetry almost twice as well as Hardy’s."

"Many poets...write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia."

"How necessary it is to think of the poet as somebody who has prepared himself to be visited by a dæmon, as a sort of accident-prone worker to whom poems happen — for otherwise we expect him to go on writing good poems, better poems, and this is the one thing you cannot expect even of good poets, much less of anybody else. Good painters in their sixties may produce good pictures as regularly as an orchard produces apples; but Planck is a great scientist because he made one discovery as a young man — and I can remember reading in a mathematician’s memoirs a sentence composedly recognizing the fact that, since the writer was now past forty, he was unlikely ever again to do any important creative work in mathematics. A man who is a good poet at forty may turn out to be a good poet at sixty; but he is more likely to have stopped writing poems, to be doing exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted to whatever commonplaces were popular when he was young. A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great."

"It is G.E. Moore at the spinet."

"All his tunk-a-tunks, his hoo-goo-boos — those mannered, manufactured, individual, uninteresting little sound-inventions — how typical they are of the lecture-style of the English philosopher, who makes grunts or odd noises, uses homely illustrations, and quotes day in and day out from Alice, in order to give what he says some appearance of that raw reality it so plainly and essentially lacks. These “tootings at the wedding of the soul” are fun for the tooter, but get as dreary for the reader as do all the foreign words — a few of these are brilliant, a few more pleasant, and the rest a disaster: “one cannot help deploring his too extensive acquaintance with the foreign languages”, as Henry James said, of Walt Whitman, to Edith Wharton."

"When you’re young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in."

"Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano."

"One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world."

"As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets."

"Taking the chance of making a complete fool of himself — and, sometimes, doing so — is the first demand that is made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he is to be of any real use to art."

"Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even — “at least not systematic”; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest."

"This poet is now, most of the time, an elder statesman like Baruch or Smuts, full of complacent wisdom and cast-iron whimsy. But of course there was always a good deal of this in the official rôle that Frost created for himself; one imagines Yeats saying about Frost, as Sarah Bernhardt said about Nijinsky: “I fear, I greatly fear, that I have just seen the greatest actor in the world.” Sometimes it is this public figure, this official rôle — the Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity — that writes the poems, and not the poet himself; and then one gets a self-made man’s political editorials, full of cracker-box philosophizing, almanac joke-cracking — of a snake-oil salesman’s mysticism; one gets the public figure’s relishing consciousness of himself, an astonishing constriction of imagination and sympathy; one gets sentimentality and whimsicality; an arch complacency, a complacent archness; and one gets Homely Wisdom till the cows come home."

"I don’t need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost’s observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person’s random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the “alienated artist” cut off from everybody who isn’t, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so — a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.)"

"People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?... The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it."

"Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence."

"Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself."

"Goethe said, “The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing”; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: “I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.” These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds."

"If my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to helplessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy breakfast — and as someone said, “If you’re going to hang me, you mustn’t expect to be able to intimidate me into sparing your feelings during the execution.”"

"How poet and public stared at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, “Since you won’t read me, I’ll make sure you can’t” — is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories."

"If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help."

"When I was asked to talk about the Obscurity of the Modern Poet I was delighted, for I have suffered from this obscurity all my life. But then I realized that I was being asked to talk not about the fact that people don’t read poetry, but about the fact that most of them wouldn’t understand it if they did: about the difficulty, not the neglect, of contemporary poetry. And yet it is not just modern poetry, but poetry, that is today obscure. Paradise Lost is what it was; but the ordinary reader no longer makes the mistake of trying to read it — instead he glances at it, weighs it in his hand, shudders, and suddenly, his eyes shining, puts it on his list of the ten dullest books he has ever read, along with Moby-Dick, War and Peace, Faust, and Boswell’s Life of Johnson. But I am doing this ordinary reader an injustice: it was not the Public, nodding over its lunch-pail, but the educated reader, the reader the universities have trained, who a few weeks ago, to the Public’s sympathetic delight, put together this list of the world’s dullest books. Since most people know about the modern poet only that he is obscure — i.e., that he is difficult, i.e., that he is neglected — they naturally make a causal connection between the two meanings of the word, and decide that he is unread because he is difficult. Some of the time this is true: the poet seems difficult because he is not read, because the reader is not accustomed to reading his or any other poetry."

"Death and the devil, what are these to him? His being accuses him — and yet his face is firm In resolution, in absolute persistence; The folds of smiling do for steadiness; The face is its own fate — a man does what he must — And the body underneath it says: I am."

"His eye a ring inside a ring inside a ring That leers up, joyless, vile, in meek obscenity — This is the devil. Flesh to flesh, he bleats The herd back to the pit of being."

"Somewhere there must be Something that's different from everything. All that I've never thought of — think of me!"

"The ways we miss our lives are life."

"The soul has no assignments, neither cooks Nor referees: it wastes its time. It wastes its time. Here in this enclave there are centuries For you to waste: the short and narrow stream Of life meanders into a thousand valleys Of all that was, or might have been, or is to be. The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly."

"We read our mail and counted up our missions — In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school — Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among The people we had killed and never seen. When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; When we died they said, "Our casualties were low." They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities."

"For this last savior, man, I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying? Men wash their hands in blood, as best they can: I find no fault in this just man."

"From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."

"If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say that they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politician stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like."

"One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits of the American public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Americans read, during a year, no book at all. I picture to myself that reader — that non-reader, rather; one man out of every two — and I reflect, with shame: "Our poems are too hard for him." But so, too, are Treasure Island, Peter Rabbit, pornographic novels — any book whatsoever."

"When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die."

"If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems — people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets — it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry.""

"Sometimes it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them. In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write — a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize."

"And the world said, Child, you will not be missed. You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road; Your death is a table in a book. You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you: Man is the judgment of the world."

"The nurse is the night To wake to, to die in: and the day I live, The world and its life are her dreams."

"I see at last that all the knowledgeI wrung from the darkness — that the darkness flung me — Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing, The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness And we call it wisdom. It is pain."

"I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry."

"Delmore carries such a petty, personally involved, New Yorkish atmosphere around with him it's almost unpleasant for me to see him. He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors."

"One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child."

"The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced."

"The allegory does not come from nowhere; a certain culture offers it to us, imposes it on us for its own purposes, fictively reducing us to the condition of being completely cut off in order to force us—even while dazzling us with its own "riches"—to judge our needs, our productions, our values, our cultural heritage, by the sole light of necessity. Robinson's adventure takes its place in the economic history of the West at the precise moment when the relation between the rates of population growth and those of good supplies inverted itself, the latter finally surpassing the former: Robinson is the man for whom population, or reproduction, is not an issue, at least in its natural, biological form; he's the producer who has to know about nothing but his own sustenance."

"Defoe is a writer of ready invention but no imagination—with none of the personal attributes which, fused together somehow, make imagination. His narrative runs smoothly, evenly, convincingly; the best thing about it is his vigorous, unornamented English. There is a strong weave in the sentences as they follow each other that gives pleasure to the eye, as the feel of good hand-woven linen does to the fingertips. But after a while one demands something more. There is never a change of tempo, never a modulation of voice, or a quickening of sympathy."

"That Robertson, however, had carefully studied the best writers, with a view to acquire genuine Anglicism, cannot be doubted. He was intimately acquainted with Swift's writings; indeed, he regarded him as eminently skilled in the narrative art. He had the same familiarity with Defoe, and had formed the same high estimate of his historical powers. I know, that when a Professor in another University consulted him on the best discipline for acquiring a good narrative style, previous to drawing up John Bell of Antermony's Travels across Russia to Tartary and the Chinese Wall, the remarkable advice he gave him was to read Robinson Crusoe carefully; and when the Professor was astonished, and supposed it was a jest, the historian said he was quite serious: but if Robinson Crusoe would not help him, or he was above studying Defoe, then he recommended Gulliver's Travels."

"He [Adam Smith] quoted some passages in Defoe, which breathed, as he thought, the true spirit of English verse."

"But not to weigh the Particulars, and come to reckon by Ounces and Drams, this is certain, and will be granted, that the Product of our improved Colonies raises infinitely more Trade, employs more Hands, and I think, I may say by Consequence, brings in more Wealth to this one particular Nation or People, the English, than all the Mines of New Spain do to the Spaniards."

"But never to be discouraged, how have they by the meer Force of indefatigable Application, planted, inhabited, cultivated those inhospitable Climates, those suppos’d barren Countries, those trifling little Spots of Islands, not thought worth looking at by the Spaniards? How have they brought them to be the richest, the most improved, and the most flourishing Colonies in all that Part of the World? So populous, so fortify’d, the People so rich, the Product so great; and which is more than all, so adapted to Commerce, so universally embarked in Trade, that it is at this Time an unresolved Doubt, whether brings the greatest Wealth to Europe, take the Exportations and Consumptions of Manufacture there into the Account of the Return, the Sugars, Tobacco, and other rich Productions of the British and French Colonies; the Fish, the Corn, the Flesh, the Furrs, &c. I say, Which are the greatest in Value, these, or the Gold and Silver of Mexico and Peru?"

"Often massacred and butcher’d, and sometimes quite driven away by the Fury of the Savages, often starv’d out and famished, and either the whole Body of Planters wasted, and perishing with Cold and Want, and as often being reduc’d to Extremities, forc’d to abandon the Country in the utmost Distress, and return starving home."

"Not discouraged by the Severity of the Cold, by the Surface over-grown with Briars and Thorns, by the early Opposition of the Natives, a Race of People fierce and false, untractable, treacherous, irreconcilable, bloody and merciless, even to the most horrible, and almost inexpressible Cruelties, who would rarely make Peace, and more rarely keep their Agreements when made."