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.
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.