“The characteristic poetic strategy of our time—refine your singularities—is something Auden has not learned; so his best poems are very peculiarly good, nearly the most interesting poems of our time. When he writes badly, we can afford to be angry at him, and he can afford to laugh at us.”

—  Randall Jarrell

“Poetry in a Dry Season”, p. 37
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

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Randall Jarrell215
poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914–1965

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“A culture is no better than its woods,” Auden writes. Fortunately for him, a book of poetry can be better than its poems. Two-thirds of The Shield of Achilles is non-Euclidean needlepoint, a man sitting on a chaise longue juggling four cups, four saucers, four sugar lumps, and the round-square: this is what great and good poets do when they don’t even bother to write great and good poems, now that they’ve learned that—it’s Auden’s leitmotif, these days—art is essentially frivolous. But a little of the time Auden is essentially serious, and the rest of the time he’s so witty, intelligent, and individual, so angelically skillful, that one reads with despairing enthusiasm, and enjoys Auden’s most complacently self-indulgent idiosyncrasy almost as one enjoys Sherlock Holmes’s writing Victoria Rex on the wall in bullet holes.”

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Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

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“The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.”

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“How are his poems?"
"He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.”

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"Answers to Questions," from Mid-Century American Poets, edited by John Ciardi, 1950 [p. 171]
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“It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it.”

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General sources
Source: "The Poetry of Amy Lowell" in The Christian Science Monitor (16 May 1925)

“The poetic image is not a static thing. It lives in time, as does the poem.”

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Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 32
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“It's a pity, a gentleman in refined retirement composing poetry:
He models his work on the classic verse of China.
And his poems are elegant, full of fine phrases.
But if you don't write of things deep in your own heart,
What's the use of churning out so many words?”

Ryōkan (1758–1831) Japanese Buddhist monk

Variant translation:
With gaudy words their lines are formed
And further adorned by novel and curious phrases.
Yet if they fail to express what is in their own minds
What is the use, no matter
How many poems they compose!
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