If I walk into a library, pick a floor, aisle, shelf, book, and page at random (just walk, don't think about it), and use a phrase that is a minimum of 12 words long -- is that more random than what I presume happened here, where someone knew that their target liked that style of poetry and was able to concentrate their search on that genre? ( a "crib" in Bletchley Park terms)

The comments about English grammar are correct - classes of words (nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc) do fall in certain positional order and frequency analysis becomes important. A brute-force attacker would have to work through four types of passwords - the commonly used passwords like "12345" and "letmein", language-based phrases (like my not-great idea), language-based phrases with letter substitution (leet-speak, etc), and then truly random letter sequences.