quicker that way too

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

—Sydney Smith (1771-1845), essayist and clergyman, quoted by Hesketh Pearson in The Smith of Smiths: Being the Life, Wit and Humour of Sydney Smith (1934)

three names

I may interpolate here that there has been a strong implication by gentlemen reviewers that there is something intrinsically humorous and definitive, in the worst sense, about the three-name woman poet. And indeed, a great number of the triple-threat ladies have been very, very bad. If, however, the poetic stature of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, or William Butler Yeats, for example, has been pegged to the number of their employed names, I have not observed it.

—Josephine Jacobsen, "From Anne to Marianne", Two Lectures (Library of Congress pamphlet, 1973)

stone wind gray

It doesn’t bother me that the word “stone” appears more than thirty times in my third book, or that “wind” and “gray” appear over and over in my poems to the disdain of some reviewers. If I didn’t use them that often I’d be lying about my feelings, and I consider that unforgivable.

—Richard Hugo, title essay of The Triggering Town (Norton, 1979)