46 quotes
Some of Mr. Gregory’s poems have merely appeared in The New Yorker; others are New Yorker poems: the inclusive topicality, the informed and casual smartness, the flat fashionable irony, meaningless because it proceeds from a frame of reference whose amorphous superiority is the most definite thing about it — they are the trademark not simply of a magazine but of a class.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
...most of the people in a war never fight for even a minute — though they bear for years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer, only die: the sum of all this passive misery is that great activity, War.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
...we like somebody who succeeds with such bad conscience, and who seems to wish that he had the nerve to be a failure or, better still, something to which the terms success and failure don’t apply — as when Mallory said, about Everest: “Success is meaningless here.”
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
A poem is sort of an onion of contexts, and you can no more locate any of the important meanings exclusively in a part than you can locate a relation in one of its terms. The significance of a part may be greatly modified or even in extreme cases completely reversed by later and larger parts and by the whole.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
Early in his life Mr. [Ezra] Pound met with strong, continued, and unintelligent opposition. If people keep opposing you when you are right, you think them fools; and after a time, right or wrong, you think them fools simply because they oppose you. Similarly, you write true things or good things, and end by thinking things true or good simply because you write them
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
“Modern” poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are — who could endure a century of transition?
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)