“[William Carlos Williams] saw all the little magazines, from Others to This Quarter, and before and after them, as one single magazine, ‘a continuous magazine . . . with an absolute freedom of editorial policy and a succession of proprietorships that follows a democratic rule’. Take the little magazine away, he wrote, and a prominent support is cut from under the poet, and for years he may get nothing into print; ‘loose ends are left dangling, men are lost’, he wrote in true sorrow, ‘promises that needed culture, needed protection and wit and courage to back them simply die’.”

(Kay Boyle, p. 173 in Robert McAlmon & Kay Boyle, Being Geniuses Together.)

“He was working on Ulysses at the time and often would make appointments to read rather lengthy extracts of what he had most recently written. Probably he read to me about a third of the book. It was impressive to observe how everything was grist to his mill. He was constantly leaping upon phrases and bits of slang which came naturally from my American lips, and one night, when he was slightly spiffed, he wept a bit while explaining his love or infatuation for words, mere words. Long before this explanation I had recognized that malady in him, as probably every writer has had that disease at some time or other, generally in his younger years. Joyce never recovered. He loved particularly words like ‘ineluctable’, ‘metempsychosis’ – grey, clear, abstract, fine-sounding words that are ‘ineluctable’ a bit themselves.”

(Robert McAlmon, in Robert McAlmon & Kay Boyle, Being Geniuses Together, p. 26.)

“Where was it written that you were obliged to recite the catechism of all things seen? My father would have to be selective or he wouldn’t be able to live with himself, as the expression puts it. All these memoirs he read with faltering interest and smarting eyes had been selected from other stuff, and if God was the only realistic artist, as Camus said, then why compete? Yet I could tell that some absolute of memory taunted him, as if not to remember the all insulted memory itself, but how could you snub memory, that random exchange of fluctuating chemicals ever under the duress of the so-called present? It haunted him nonetheless, maybe because he thought he would be the only survivor, Ishmael of the Somme, deputed to do duty on Remembrance Day as if Woodcock and Race did not exist and never had. I tried to coax myself into tracing my father’s mental processes year after year, noting how, of what he elected to remember, nothing fell away, but stuck there like the images in some altar-screen, all encrusted paint and holy permanence.”

(Paul West, My Father’s War: A Memoir, pp. 152–3.)

“Beauty’s simultaneity with the pure fire of living poetry is outside contemporary critical interest. The professional discipline of literary scholarship tends to dismiss Jonathan Edwards’ religious intensity as embarrassingly outmoded. Mention his name and the title of one sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is sure to follow; that is usually that. In 2008 we see through speculative knowledge and are unwilling to embrace the imaginative and aesthetic crossing he makes between our material world – the world of types – and the spiritual world as it actively flows from revelation into human history. For Edwards, new truths are suggested through inspiration, but such light is only understood and revealed int he Word of God; it can’t be given without the Word. This Calvinist minister who spent his life in the eighteenth-century Connecticut River Valley, and didn’t write in verse, had the imagination of a poet. He believed that precise word choices, when disciplined into becoming bare embodiments of ideas, would become the source or occasion of conceptual discovery.”

(Susan Howe, “Choir Answers to Choir: Notes on Jonathan Edwards and Wallace Stevens,” pp. 52–53 in the Chicago Review 54:4.)