Some will be appeased by this line from The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud:

"Thank you for your question about Lowell," he said. "It's a relief to find a young person who knows that once upon a time, poetry did make things happen."

It's a good enough book that I'm getting sucked in. The book jacket calls Messud "a nearly perfect writer." She's proficient, but so often writes terribly overweighted, digressive sentences, like this one:

Murray was revisited, in his desk chair, with the subsiding ror of the late night traffic at his ear, by a vision of his childhood home, the paneled vestibule and dining room, the cramped darkness of it, and the meanness, everything spare and bleached and doubly worn, and only their mother, their beautiful mother, with her patrician profile and wavy dark hair, like Ingrid Bergman, his mother the fantasist, who in spite of her ability to peel and prune and scour and press, in spite of her eternal apron and hospital corners, read novels and magazines and dreamed for herself and her son: of wider vistas, of glittering cocktail parties on Park Avenue, of fancy hotel rooms and travel to Europe.

It took me forever to find the period at the end of that. This book needs a referee to blow a whistle on these sentences.