Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.
Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.
The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.
The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.
No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.
Shakespeare is universal.
What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.
Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.
Originality must compound with inheritance.
The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.
Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.
Shakespeare will not make us better and will not make us worse, but he may allow us to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves.
Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.
To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude.
Shakespeare’s exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.
He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent.