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.