First one gets works of art, then criticism of them, then criticism of the criticism, and, finally, a book on The Literary Situation , a book which t….

An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not noti….

An intelligent man said that the world felt Napoleon as a weight, and that when he died it would give a great oof of relief. This is just as true of ….

when General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as "a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows", he was speaking not as ….

Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand….

Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?.

Some of Mr. Gregory's poems have merely appeared in The New Yorker ; others are New Yorker poems: the inclusive topicality, the informed and casual s….

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose..

Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) wi….

Most people don't listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By..

Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside….

A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face..

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 l….

most of the people in a war never fight for even a minute though they bear for years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer….

People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others..

If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stay….

The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time..

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

A person is a process, one that leads to death..

We died like aunts of pets or foreigners..

The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art..