"The mythic vision of engaging Apollo in a divine music-making contest devolves into notes that would seem more appropriate for a toilet-paper-roll blowgun." Tom Sleigh • Blackbird

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"Warren took it upon himself to write a thirty-page handout on metrics and imagery, which was first used in the spring semester of 1935. A year later, the handout had been expanded to include fiction, drama, and prose—and was printed by LSU with the title, An Approach to Literature. (The scholarly old-guard on campus, unimpressed by the book, began calling it 'The Reproach to Literature.')" Garrick Davis • Contemporary Poetry Review

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"If I saw all of these movies, I asked myself, how did I ever find the time to sleep, eat, read books, teach students, raise a family and write hundreds of poems?" Charles Simic • NYRB

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"The poetry of ease (should such a thing exist) would be poetry that does not speak of that state as one speaks of an unknown country we might wish one day to visit—Cockaigne, Bensalem, Innisfree—but rather a poetry that expresses ease as we express our native air: stirring it with our living presence, not exhausting it with our efforts." Oren Izenberg • Nonsite

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"However, we must settle down, here at the back of the class, and grant that The Complete Poems is an almost fanatically painstaking and altogether admirable piece of work." John Banville • Guardian

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"Frivolous and serious, mischievous and magisterial, poets play both sides of the coin of freedom — heads they study (“the scholar’s art,” Wallace Stevens called poetry), tails they frisk. If freedom and poetry seem paradoxical, freedom and poets are all but identical." Ange Mlinko on Susan Stewart • LARB (scroll down)

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"His translation frequently makes the verbal imperatives of an epic style an aid to vividness." Jeremy Noel-Tod on Simon Armitage • Telegraph

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"He was often reduced to penury, and the humiliation of calling on his muses to plea for money in verse." Charles Isherwood on Ben Jonson • NYT

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"Squeak, there are other animals inside the pump, the great manatee -- Trichechus manatus -- you've seen it float like a rug that has something wrapped in it among grasses that will not return." Brenda Hillman • Interim

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"You know, on my first book I got one rather favorable review that wound up saying, “she has no philosophy whatever.” People who are city people are often bothered by all this “nature” in my poems." Elizabeth Bishop (1977) • Ploughshares

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"The lack of substantive criticism of his work is almost certainly due to the fact that each sympathetic critic who comes along—Hollander, Ormsby—feels duty-bound to make the case for the poet afresh, with just enough space left over for those so inclined—Kinzie, or more recently Jason Guriel—to distinguish between Hine’s best work and those places where his genius, to revise Hollander, doesn’t know where to leave off." Bill Coyle on Daryl Hine • CPR

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"I don’t mean that the classics are synonymous with Western culture; there are of course many other multicultural strands and traditions that demand our attention, define who we are, and without which the contemporary world would be immeasurably poorer. But the fact is that Dante read Virgil’s Aeneid, not the epic of Gilgamesh." Mary Beard • NYRB

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"All poems, like all children, are in some wide sense mis-translations, altered or incorrect adaptations, based on earlier generations of people or poems." Stephen Burt • Almost Island

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"But to return to the older model of walking. It’s no accident that our word for the basic measure of prosody, of poetic structure, is ‘foot.’ [...] We may associate the evolved forms of human culture, including poetry, with post-nomadic settlement and the life of cities – with the polis and with metropolitan sophistication – but how we know stuff, how we access and structure our knowledge and understanding of what matters, may very well involve archaic modes of cognition activated and produced through complex interactions of walking, perceiving, thinking, and talking. Ian Wedde • ka mate ka ora

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"And the alternatives the Modernists offered were abstraction and collage. Abstraction was a kind of escape hatch that let you evade culturally degraded materials so you could attend to other things, while collage was a strategy of accepting these clichés, fragmenting, combining, reframing them and applying them to another purpose." David Antin • Dear Navigator

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"This space of compassion—poetry—is the space from which we should address immigration and education policy." Craig Santos Perez • Kenyon Review

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"In the blue dark of 3 a.m., images cycle through the mind, though the eyes remain open and fixed." Brian Turner • VQR

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"Subject matter itself is at a crossroads right now in American poetry." Arielle Greenberg • American Poetry Review

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"The referential largesse of the poems felt, then, like a kind of counterbalance." Peter Campion on David Wojahn • Diode

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"With some notable exceptions, taste is not a moral category." Jonathan Farmer • The Millions

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"In spite of their fierce words, many poets worry that they are the final generation to speak their native tongue." Clare Sullivan • World Literature Today

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"I think of what Wallace Stevens says in The Necessary Angel. A poet has no moral role. A poet has to use imagination to press back against the violence of reality. I don’t agree. He also wrote that reality was growing more insistent, more violent. I agree with that." Eliza Griswold • Poetry

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"He has been called a misfit, a dreamer, a sinner, a castaway, a wayward child, a hobgoblin, a flibbertigibbet, a waif, a weird, a pariah, a prodigal, a picturesque ruin, a sensitive plant, an exquisite machine with insufficient steam, the oddest of God’s creatures, and, most frequently—by his father, his mother, his brother, and his sister; by William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle; and by countless others over the years—“Poor Hartley.”" Anne Fadiman • Lapham's Quarterly

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"[Max] Jacob told Maurice Martin du Gard in 1920, “It’s Picasso who changed my life…It was he who told me, ‘Shave off your beard.’ He who told me, ‘Take off your pince-nez, wear a monocle. Don’t be time-puncher. Live like a poet.’”" Rosanna Warren • Little Star

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"All four poets are reacting to big modern systems, above all to the system called capitalism, whose results and failures seem inescapable, from the swells of the North Pacific (where miles of plastic collect and glaciers decay) to the American flag on the moon. Their poems look like disrupted systems, fractured but conveying information nonetheless. In paths through and under and around those systems, economic, environmental and linguistic, these poets address what the critic and poet Christopher Nealon calls the “matter of capital,” the built-up stuff (facts and texts) that our social system manipulates and accumulates, treats as fungible or attempts to discard." Stephen Burt • The Nation

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"Provincial though they might be, these poets do not write for readers whose interest is Little England. They are about as far from the English Defence League as you could get and they would be strident in their condemnation of the EDL’s hijackings of nationality." Ian Pople • Manchester Review

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"What occurs in the process of writing a lyric poem is the diminishment of temporal suspension and of experience (real or imagined) that initiated the poem." Jason Tandon on Charles Simic • Rattle

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"His irreverence is a bracing antidote to just about any edition of the evening news: “I hadn’t meant to go grave robbing with Richard Dawkins,” he says in “The Experience,” “but he can be very persuasive.”" Dana Jennings on Simon Armitage and others • NYT

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"Even dedicated readers of poetry in our own time can be divided into two groups: those who know Vachel Lindsay and his work, and those who don’t." TR Hummer • Slate

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"[Georgia] O’Keeffe’s letters, by contrast, are alert to the physical world, to the power of words, and to punctuation. Pages of manuscript reproduced in these books reveal that her dashes, like Emily Dickinson’s, assume all sorts of shapes, from squiggles to playful curlicues to abrupt downward slopes." Christopher Benfey • NYRB

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"For Neruda in Chile, India, or Spain in the 1930s, a poem was a more powerful vehicle than a newspaper, but in America in 2011, we all agreed that a prose piece in the Times gave Hass not only a wider audience but a level of credibility a poem might not." Dean Rader • Huffington Post

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