sleepy family habits

Miss Stein is bringing back life to our language by what appears, at first, to be an anarchic process. First she breaks down the predestined groups of words, their sleepy family habits; then she rebrightens them, examines their texture, and builds them into new and vital shapes.

—Edith Sitwell, Poetry and Criticism (Hogarth Essays No.11, Hogarth Press, 1925)

poems are lumps

Poems are lumps—physical entities. This does not mean, of course, that they are not about something—the complete dependence of all the paths, the threads, time-space, History, the Social. And the more unrestrainedly the poet gives himself up to the materiality, the more precisely these lumps give off the quality of his conscious effort, of his opinions and ideas. Which is far more interesting than the opinions and ideas themselves—only physical submission shows how long the succession is, demonstrates their real drama.

—Per Kirkeby, “Painterly Poetry,” Selected Essays from Bravura (Van Abbemuseum, 1982)

perfect title

I hit upon Edwin Arlington Robinson’s beautiful and powerful poem “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man From Stratford,” a philosophical and critical monologue in the grand manner which I have read, I imagine, at least thirty times, and then I read again Robinson’s “The Man Against the Sky,” a poem with so perfect a title that you foreknow all it will contain.

—Burton Rascoe, A Bookman’s Daybook (Horace Liveright, 1929), edited by C. Hartley Gratton [79]