"Never attained by most"

Photograph of ink courtesy of  Ben Joosen of Brasschaat, Antwerp, Belgium and sxc.hu.

Here is Helen Vendler being penetrating and quotable in "Are These the Poems to Remember," a review of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited and with an introduction by Rita Dove  in The New York Review of Books.  I imagine that the author found this review a bit uncomfortable, as