It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory.
I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante’s Commedia, Shakespeare’s King Lear, or Tolstoy’s novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity.
Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.
Infinite knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance.
Denying Ahab greatness is an aesthetic blunder: He is akin to Achilles, Odysseus, and King David in one register, and to Don Quixote, Hamlet, and the High Romantic Prometheus of Goethe and Shelley in another. Call the first mode a transcendent heroism and the second the persistence of vision. Both ways are antithetical to nature and protest against our mortality. The epic hero will never submit or yield.
Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate.
All canonical writing possesses the quality “of making you feel strangeness at home.
We are lived by drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist.
No, no I’m not an atheist. it’s no fun being an atheist .
Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.
Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.
One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.
Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion.
Wild with laughter, Twelfth Night is nevertheless almost always on the edge of violence.
To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory “pipe dreams” is right also.
Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human.
A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity’s disorders, including the fear of mortality.
What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.
There’s very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she’d been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn’t even good nonsense. It’s insufferable.
According to the myth, Prometheus steal fire to free us; Iago steals us as fresh fodder for the fire.