Hair-splittings (Williams)

I began to feel that a great deal of human interaction, a large portion of real moral sensibility and concern, had somehow been usurped from the poets by the novel and drama...It felt to me as though anything that was on a large emotional scale, anything truly passionate, absorbing, or crucial, had been forsaken by poetry.  What the poets of our time seemed to be left with were subtleties, hair-splittings, minute recordings of a delicate atmosphere.

C. K. Williams