“After all, what is lyric but the seamless fusion of formal control and passionate conviction, in the service of the expression of personal experience?”

“Criticism is like politics: if you don't make your own you are by default accepting the status quo and are finally yourself responsible for whatever the status quo does to you.”

“. . .criticism is to poetry as air is to a noise: it allows it to be heard; and even if we can't see it or feel it, it is there, shaping how we hear.”

“the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.”

“A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.”

“Her strength was in the integrity of her actions; she never compromised what she believed she ought to do.”

“...men lived and died all the time by the peculiarities of their soul, which they could never expect one another to understand.”