Value is the quality a thing can never possess in privacy but acquires automatically the moment it appears in public.
(Hannah Arendt)

A poem does not come into existence by accident. The words of a poem, as Professor Stoll has remarked, come out of a head, not out of a hat. Yet to insist on the designing intellect as a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet's performance.
(William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley)

So far as rewards and punishments are concerned--and they are a great concern in tragedy--distributive justice, to each according to his desert, is a weak dramatic form, a concession to the audience. It appears in comedy.
(William K. Wimsatt, Jr.)

The juxtaposition of tales to each other and to the dramatic frame of the pilgrimage is the largest counter of Chaucer's style. It is the largest manifestation of what we can see in The Canterbury Tales from the mixed idiom up: Chaucer's endless interest in comparisons and relationships.
(Charles Muscatine)

A poet is called a "fictor" or "formator" because for true things he says false things or at least he from time to time mixes true things with false.
(Conrad of Hirsau)