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.
Hope and joy, however irrational, are stronger than dispair, and ultimately more pernicious.
But I can’t understand a Yahweh, or a God, who could be all-powerful and all knowing and would allow the Nazi death camps and schizophrenia .
For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
But Hamlet is death’s ambassador while Falstaff is the embassy of life.
Without the Canon, we cease to think.
If your quest is for a truth that defies rhetoric, perhaps you ought to study political economy or systems analysis and abandon Shakespeare to the aesthetes and the groundlings, who combined to elevate him in the first place.
I am your true Marxist critic, following Groucho rather than Karl, and take as my motto Groucho’s grand admonition: “Whatever it is, I’m against it!
The central image for freedom in Lucretius is the clinamen or sudden “swerve.” As the atoms in the cosmos fall downward and outward they capriciously swerve, and this change in direction provides for our freedom of will. Last poems, as I read them, execute clinamens in regard to a previous poetic career. They assert a final freedom for the imagination.
Freud, slyly following Shakespeare, gave us our map of the mind; Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.
Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness.
Our educational institutions are thronged these days by idealistic resenters who denounce competition in literature as in life, but the aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to all the ancient Greeks, and to Burckhardt and Nietzsche, who recovered this truth.
All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.
I regard Clarissa and In Search of Lost Time as the two most eminent of all novels, surpassing even Tolstoy and Dickens.
The pre-Socratic aphorism – ethos is the daemon – can be translated as “character is fate.” In drama, character is action. Shakespeare, too capacious for any formula, leads me to a rival aphorism: Pathos also is the daemon, which could be rendered as “personality is our destiny.” In Shakespearean theatricalism, personality is suffering. Action, Wordsworth wrote, is momentary, while suffering is permanent, obscure, dark, and shares the nature of infinity.
The vision men call Lilith is formed primarily by their anxiety at what they perceive to be the beauty of a woman’s body, a beauty they believe to be at once, far greater and far less than their own.
The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools.
Great styles are sufficient for canonicity because they possess the power of contamination, and contamination is the pragmatic test for canon formation.
I think that the self, in its quest to be free and solitary, ultimately reads with one aim only: to confront greatness. That confrontation scarcely masks the desire to join greatness, which is the basis of the aesthetic experience once called the Sublime: the quest for a transcendence of limits.
I again recall provoking resentment by dubbing the American bard “a male lesbian,” much as Shakespeare was when writing the sonnets.
Attempting to read many of the works set forth as resentment’s alternatives to the Canon, I reflect that these aspirants must believe they have spoken prose all their lives, or else that their sincere passions are already poems, requiring only a little overwriting.