"If egotism is a crime, Coleridge argued, then poets who give sincere expression to their own states of mind are innocent of it." Jonathan Ree • The Nation

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"Why do critics feel a need to defend the authors they write on, like doting parents deaf to all criticism of their obnoxious children?" Terry Eagleton • Prospect

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"Kundera argues that the novel's purpose is not to uplift us, or to provide moral guidance, but to make us less afraid." Susan Salter Reynolds • Los Angeles Times

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"Playing with words, Muldoon simultaneously takes shelter from painful facts and faces up to them." Langdon Hammer • The New York Times

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"James Fenton has survived the specter of his own immense promise." Stephen Metcalf • The New York Times

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"Auden carried the English language with him, and this, along with his memories, was a homeland." Katherine Bucknell • The Observer

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"Experimental poets have begun to appreciate Frost's emphasis on writing-as-performance, and to treat him as a valuable source rather than an opponent." David Orr • The New York Times

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"Song lyrics have taken up much of the 'oxygen' previously reserved for poets." The supermodel school of poetry, by Brendan Bernhard • The New York Sun

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"That he was a great public poet, despite his misgivings about the role, has always been acknowledged. But he was also a great lyrical poet." James Fenton on W.H. Auden • The Guardian

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"To inhabit the myth is like living in a prison, denied of any sudden flowering, of any intellectual enrichment." Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim and Taha Muhammed Ali, by John Palattella • The Nation

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