Mr. Eliot is right when he says of ["Nightwood"] that it is "really 'written'" [see excerpt above]. It is too consistently "written" for quotations to mean much, nor does any sentence contain the whole. Yet if Mr. Eliot is also right in the analogy he suggests with poetry, the book can be searched for good "lines." And they are easily found. Some of them are witty

She defiled the very meaning of personality in her passion to be a person….

And some of them are pretty in a tremendous way:

"We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality."…

But the poetry of which Mr. Eliot must have been speaking will be found on a third level, as far removed from these as the poetry of our time is from mere wit, mere charm. On Miss Barnes's third level a special state of consciousness is...