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.
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.
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.
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.