Quote of the Day

The poet…is born, it appears, with a stronger-than-usual need for verbal adequacy, and so he is always mustering and reviewing his vocabulary, and forearming himself with terms he may need in the future. I recall the excitement of a poet friend when he discovered in a mushroom guide the word “duff,” which signifies “decaying vegetable matter on the forest floor.” He was right to be excited, I think. Duff is a short, precise word which somehow sounds like what it means, and it is a word that poets must often have groped after in vain.

—Richard Wilbur, “Poetry and Happiness”