“The aim I have set before me in this book is to give back to English readers the understanding of and delight in this great poet which thrilled his contemporaries and early successors.”

“The Faerie Queene was intended by its author to be a philosophical poem and was so regarded by his contemporaries and immediate successors, whose appreciation of it was so great.”

“I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.”

“The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.”

“Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.”

“I say, 'Get me some poets as managers.' Poets are our original systems thinkers. They contemplate the world in which we live and feel obligated to interpret, and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how that world runs. Poets, those unheralded systems thinkers, are our true digital thinkers. It is from their midst that I believe we will draw tomorrow's new business leaders."--Sidney Harman, CEO Multimillionaire of a stereo components company”