much greater thing

Almost every artist overestimates the impact and the influence of his/her art.

brain drain

After the Enlightenment the exegetes fled from the Bible to literature; hence we have scholarly critics.

image of note

    The mussel flats ooze out,
    And now the barnacles, embossed,
    Stacked rocks are pedestals for strangers,
    For my own strange sons,
    Scraping in the pools,
    Imperiling their pure reflections.

Anne Stevenson, from "With My Sons at Boarhills."

first rule of criticism

A critic must not corrupt the text with invented material.

body before book

He was still young enough to prefer taking someone’s body to bed rather than a book.

quote from the blue

With quoted entries ranging from the obscure to the random, it was an ‘uncommonplace book’.

aide-sommeil

Bad blurb: This book is the perfect bedside companion.

undisturbed philistine

[Printed on the complimentary bookmark from Blackwell’s, 50, 51 Broad Street, Oxford]
The famous Bookshop where generations of undergraduates and graduates, poets and philistines alike, have browsed to their hearts’ content undisturbed.
—The Sunday Times [no date given]

n.b.: I first read ‘philosophers’ for ‘philistines’ in the quote above. Attracting ‘poets and philosophers alike’ would be a better bit of advertising for the bookshop. What good is a browsed book that cannot disturb a philistine?

critic types

A thug critic, a theory critic, a thiswayandorthat critic.

cut through

It was no caesura, it was a scissor’s cut through the line.

play no favorites

No word held higher than another.

preferred experience

It was a poem I’d rather have read to me, than have had to read myself.

classically defined

‘Classical qualities, classical form’ are easy words to say. What exactly do they mean? They imply an idea of excellence; they imply also clearness, sobriety, the art of composition; they mean, finally, that reason, rather than imagination and sensibility, presides over the execution of the work, and that the writer dominates his material.

—Jules Lemaître, “Guy De Maupassant,” Literary Impressions (Kennikat Press, 1971)

laid out in there

Old anthology with a charnel house for a contents page.

no rain

Block: Why will the letters not rain over the desert blankness of the page?

pressed poetry

Oppression makes poets. In the land of perfect liberty songs are not pressed out of the heart.

—Elia Peattie (8/14/96: 8)

[Emerson: Poems are expedients to get bread. (paraphrase)]

preferred if not perfect

As a critic he knew not to expect perfect, but he knew what to prefer.

against whiplash

Perhaps a prose poet gets tired of being jerked around by linebreaks.

wag and shrug

The poet shrugs as the grammarian wags a finger.

poetry speaking

Certain words when you come upon them in a poem signal this is poetic writing.

like a burr

An aphorism
should be
like a burr:
sting,
stick,
and leave
a little soreness
afterwards.

—Irving Layton, "Aphs," The Whole Bloody Bird: Obs, Aphs & Pomes (1969)

out of order

One who put art ahead of life, and then was dead.