I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
How to read “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.
Real reading is a lonely activity.
There is no method except yourself.
At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.
Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.
Criticism starts – it has to start – with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.
It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential.
There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.
Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well.
To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.
Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.
The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.
Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.
Literature is achieved anxiety.
The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.