Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods

Meanwhile, we patronize the past only at the risk of becoming a mob of Mrs. Grundys.

We’re allowed to shake our heads a little at what previous ages thought (or more usually failed to think), but we cannot escape the knowledge that the future may look askance at moral failings to which we are blind.

not of his poetry, but of his prejudices.

None has much influence on the poetry—it has effect only when critics decide that all authors should be taken to the pillory, if not the gallows.

We cannot blame the past for being the past, for having attitudes that strike us as unfortunate or even horrifying.

You don’t have to scratch the great modernists very deeply to find something unhappy in their makeup, whether anti-Semitism or the casual racist slurs of which all were guilty.

Ben Jonson killed a man in a duel.

Coleridge was an opium addict.

The critic’s job of work is to drag poems back to the world in which they were made, to restore the lost background of their creation, while knowing that history has sometimes been used to bully poems and their authors.

There’s no Whig history of criticism, at least to the cynic, only small successes in a landscape strewn with pitfalls and bear traps.