On Fairy-Stories:

Excerpt From ‘On Fairy Stories’ by J.R.R. Tolkien

“I have claimed that escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “escape” is now so often used … Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, He tries to get out and go home? Or if, he cannot do so, he thinks and talks of other topics than jailers and prison walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter”.

"If you cannot find meaning in a poem very likely there is no meaning there. Use your common sense. You are being hoaxed by critics who tell you there is profound symbolism there which is too deep for you to understand. People have deserted their own good judgment and daren't trust their own opinion, so that if I write:

Apples fall upward

Into silent thunder

they don't know if it is by a great modern poet and therefore great poetry, or if it is pure nonsense."

- Lord Dunsany, quoted by Hazel Littlefield in her book, "Lord Dunsany: King of Dreams," p. 91

“I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labelled ‘science fiction’ … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.” Kurt Vonnegut

Almost Anything

by Clark Ashton Smith

Superlatively sonorous

Like a saxophone full of brass tacks and coffin-nails;

Reverberantly rhythmical and rhythmically reverberant

Like the quobbing of a foetus five months old

In the womb of a she-baboon;

Imperial, romantic and picturesque

Like a merd-brown fog slinking away through slum alleys

And over the city dump;

Fair and pulchritudinous as a female Hottentot with buttocks two axe-handles broad

And eyes that shine like rotten mackerel by moonlight;

More savorous than Gorgonzola buried for two months

At the bottom of a ship-load of guano;

Soft and voluptuous

Like the bosom of an acaleph that is more than slightly moribund;

And fragrant as a room

Where a cat was shut in by mistake. . .

But you say that my meaning is obscure,

And that it is hard to understand what I am referring to:

I ask you,

Hypocrite lecteur, mon sembable, mon frère,

What is the use of writing this modernist poetry

If one is not permitted

To be decently or indecently cryptic on occasion? . . .

And as for the meaning—

Well, I am not any too sure myself,

But if you are really determined to know,

I suggest that you refer the matter to some modernist critic.