“Designed to guide readers through the vocabulary and allusiveness of writers as well as provide them with a genuine source book of ideas.”

An encyclopedia meant both to decode allusion and to feed invention · Preface statement, The Reader’s Encyclopedia

• Ideas
• Literature
• Readers

“A well-organized supplementary memory, in one volume.”

Reference work conceived as an extra store of literary recall · Preface, The Reader’s Encyclopedia

• Knowledge
• Memory
• Reading

“The trend of modern poetry, as we have remarked before, is quite away from the song.”

A critic’s regret that contemporary verse had left singing behind · Essay, Saturday Review of Literature, 1930

• Modernity
• Music
• Poetry

“The detective story pure and simple has as definite limitations of form as the sonnet in poetry.”

Genre craft compared to a strict lyric form · Essay, Saturday Review of Literature, 1926

• Fiction
• Form
• Poetry

“The earliest ones were written by a boy who was in love, and the latest by a man who has suddenly stepped into the dark.”

A book of poems spanning courtship and widowhood · Foreword, Perpetual Light

• Grief
• Love
• Writing

“Every day was an adventure to her with the hope of accomplishing something over and above mere routine and the pursuit of pleasure.”

Daily life framed as spiritual experiment rather than habit · Foreword, Perpetual Light

• Adventure
• Life
• Purpose

“If I merely recount the outlines of her life, it loses her.”

Biography as outline cannot hold the person · Foreword, Perpetual Light

• Biography
• Life
• Memory

“It is even harder to express in bald prose a personality that had so many sides, so many varying strengths, such inner sight and yet such a forthright splendid intelligence.”

Prose no more adequate than verse to a complex life · Foreword, Perpetual Light

• Intelligence
• Personality
• Prose

“As I turn these poems over—if they are even to be called poems—I realize that they can never begin to express what her personality was.”

Poetry admitted as incomplete against a living character · Foreword, Perpetual Light

• Loss
• Personality
• Poetry

“This is the only means I have at present of acknowledging publicly the vast debt I owe to her.”

Verse offered as public thanks after bereavement · Foreword, Perpetual Light

• Gratitude
• Love
• Memory

“Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.”

Art as sweetness drawn from experience that also wounds · Preface, Man Possessed

• Life
• Poetry
• Suffering