Underneath all his writing there is the settled determination to use certain words, to take certain attitudes, to produce a certain atmosphere; what he is seeing or thinking or feeling has hardly any influence on the way he writes. The reader can reply, ironically, "That's what it means to have a style"; but few people have so much of one, or one so obdurate that you can say of it, "It is a style that no subject can change."

"Recent Poetry," The Yale Review (Autumn 1955) [p. 237] - Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)