The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.
Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry.
One reads for oneself and for strangers.
Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge.
King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.
To condemn Wordsworth for not writing verse of political and social protest, or for having forsaken the revolution, is to cross the final divide between academic arrogance and moral smugness.
Characters carrying the playwright’s disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.
American Religionists, when I questioned them, frequently said that falling in love was affirming again Christ’s love for each of them.
Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket.
You get too much at last of everything: of sunsets, of cabbages, of love.
Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Frye’s influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, July 11, 1967, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, “The Covering Cherub; or, Poetic Influence.
For Ibsen, gusto forgives almost everything.
No one dies halfway through the last act. – Heinrich Ibsen.
The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.
The freedom to apprehend aesthetic value may rise from class conflict, but the value is not identical with the freedom, even if it cannot be achieved without that apprehension. Aesthetic value is by definition engendered by an interaction between artists, an influencing that is always an interpretation.
Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left.
Hermetic angelology, studied by Corbin in his Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, posits a middle reality between sensory perceptions and divine revelations.
All of us are, as Mr. Stevens said, “condemned to be that inescapable animal, ourselves.
You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is in this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself.