(2 of 2)
Archibald MacLeish: His "delicate lyric gift" resulted in smoothly beautiful and simple early poems. But he soon "began to make overpowering demands upon this limited and specific talent . . . much of MacLeish's later work is the public speech of an authoritative public figure who is controlling the responses of a mass audience ... It is almost more conscious of the impressiveness of what it says than of what it says."
Theodore Roethke: "Many poets are sometimes childish; Roethke, uniquely, is sometimes babyish, though he is a powerful Donatello baby who has love affairs, and whose marsh-like Unconscious is continually celebrating its marriage with the whole wet dark underside of things."
Robert Lowell: "A poet of great originality and power who has, extraordinarily, developed instead of repeating himself. His poems have a wonderful largeness and grandeur, exist on a scale that is unique today. You feel before reading any new poem of his the uneasy expectation of perhaps encountering a masterpiece."
On Romantic Women Poets: "Elinor Wylie was the most crystalline . . . Edna St. Vincent Millay the most powerful and most popular. One thinks with awe and longing of this real and extraordinary popularity of hers: if only there were some poet—Frost, Stevens, Eliot—whom people still read in canoes!"