Should poets’ bicycle-pump the human heart or squash it flat?

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart: Girls aren’t like that The above lines are written by:

The correct answer is Kingsley Amis.

These lines are excerpted from the poem "A Bookshop Idyll", written by the English novelist, poet, and critic Kingsley Amis (1922–1995). Amis was a prominent figure of "The Movement", a group of British writers in the 1950s that championed a realistic, anti-romantic, and conversational tone in literature.
In "A Bookshop Idyll", the speaker browses a bookshop and compares the differing poetic themes of male and female writers. The quoted lines humorously critique the exaggerated ways male poets handle emotion—questioning if they should inflate the heart like a bicycle pump or crush it completely. Amis then playfully paraphrases a famous line from Lord Byron's Don Juan ("Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; 'Tis woman's whole existence") and flatly debunks it with the dry, colloquial observation: "Girls aren't like that."