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.
The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.
Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for “transport”.
According to the myth, Prometheus steal fire to free us; Iago steals us as fresh fodder for the fire.
Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.
What could Yeshua of Nazareth have made of Martin Luther’s outburst “Death to the Law!” which in many German Lutherans who served Hitler became “Death to the Jews!” The Germans would not have crucified Jesus: they would have exterminated him at Auschwitz, their version of the Temple.
We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.
The unity of a great era is generally an illusion.
Calling a work of sufficient literary power either religious or secular is a political decision, not an aesthetic one.
There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.
Oscar Wilde’s “beautiful untrue things” that save the imagination from falling into “careless habits of accuracy.
Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett’s canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett’s Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
The James family, raised by their Emersonian father, accepted their heritage, with reservations by Henry yet fewer by William.
Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.
I don’t believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards to the literary scene. The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent. The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature.