People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I.
Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don’t see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?
More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.
What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism – which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people – is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.
What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.
If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.
The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.
I don’t believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.
Criticism in the universities, I’ll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It’s Stalinism without Stalin.
We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.