spleen and ideal

"Browning is a man with a moderate gift passionately desiring movement and fullness, and obtaining but a confused multitudinousness"
      — Matthew Arnold

[the teaching of poetry can] "expose counterfeit work, thus gradually leading the student to the valid"
      — Ezra Pound

"the setting and comforts are those of a man with a private income, at home and petulant and spoiled, like the older Auden"
      — Michael Schmidt on Browning's poem "By the Fireside"

[Whitman's] "democratic syntax . . . the non-subordination of clauses"
      — Mark Strand