The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
Read Blake or go to hell, that’s my message to the modern world.
The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.
Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of.
A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.
We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It’s just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.
Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.
Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.
This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us.
We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them.
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.
The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time.
Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.
In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.
War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.