“nor is it valid / to discriminate against ‘business documents and / school-books’; all these phenomena are important.”

“One must make a distinction / however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not / poetry”

“when [poems] become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the / same thing may be said for all of us—that we / do not admire what / we cannot understand.”

“Reading [poetry], however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in / it after all, a place for the genuine.”