... one straggles gracelessly through a wilderness of common sense. It is an experience for which the reader of modern criticism is unprepared: in that jungle through which one wanders, with its misshapen and extravagant and cannibalistic growths, bent double with fruit and tentacles, disquieting with their rank eccentric life, one comes surprisingly on something so palely healthy: a decorous plant, without thorns or flowers, rootless in the thin sand of the drawing room.

of Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay by Louis MacNiece, From That Island, pp. 31–32 - Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)