When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, “one that expects no liberation from liberation.
The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.
Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.
Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.
Infinite Jest’ is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it.
Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.
Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers.
Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.
Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes.
At eighty-four, I can only write the way I go on teaching, personally and passionately.
You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.
The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.
Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad, “tuned the English tongue.
A play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be attained only when the protagonist can separate his genius for expanding consciousness from his own passion for theatricality.
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.
American Religionists, when I questioned them, frequently said that falling in love was affirming again Christ’s love for each of them.