by indirect means

The relationship between an artist and reality is always an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can only approach that reality by indirect means.

—Richard Wilbur, Quarterly Review of Literature, 7, p.189

what a pity

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies—for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry—I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home."

―Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse (Harvard Univ. Press, 2000)

straightforward and quirky

There was a savior who rescued me from the Romantic complexities and showed me that I could love poetry in English: Carl Sandburg, my first American poet. He was quite popular at the time, and a classmate introduced me to one of his volumes. Here were poems I could understand, written in free verse, in plain, idiomatic American English. They were straightforward and, at the same time, quirky and mysterious. Their spirit was democratic and deeply humane...

—Lisel Mueller, First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them (Simon & Schuster, 2000), edited by Carmela Ciuraru.