If poetry is to exist at all, it really must have form and grammar, and must rhyme when it professes to rhyme.”

—Writer Andrew Lang

It is plain that Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and grotesque fancy … an eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar.

—Novelist Thomas Bailey Aldrich

References:

• “Western Canon”
• “postal stamp”
• “must have form and grammar”
• “grotesque fancy”