"Richard Hugo's concern is the unenviable, the unvisited, even the uninviting, which he must invest with his own deprivations, his own private war. The distinctiveness of impulse int he language, the movement organized in single syllables by the craving mind, this credible richness is related to, is even derived from, the poverty of the places, local emanations, free (or freed) to be the poet's own." —Richard Howard

"Richard Hugo is such an important poet because the difficulties inherent in his art provide him a means of saying what he has to say. It is no accident that he must develop a negative in order to produce a true image." —Richard Howard