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.
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.