To have your poems criticized by Jarrell - when they didn't please him - was like meeting your fate, like a foretaste of death. To go with his daunting judgement, he had an unlimited stock of images for catching exactly each poet's inadequacies, so that their predicaments were far more vividly expressed than anything they themselves had written. Jarrell made literature out of their failure to make it.

Randall had a great flair for the poetry of desperation.

What he could do in poetry he did early and with prodigious security; he was one of our true poets for thirty years and practically the only American poet able…

Your tenderness and terrorization, your prose sentences - like Bernini graves, staggeringly expensive, Italianate, warm, sentences once-and-for-all.

If you are The Game, then quite frankly, you need to go back to the drawing board because your game absolutely sucks!

Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump ou…

The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, g…