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.
Characters carrying the playwright’s disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.
Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket.
You get too much at last of everything: of sunsets, of cabbages, of love.
Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Frye’s influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, July 11, 1967, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, “The Covering Cherub; or, Poetic Influence.
For Ibsen, gusto forgives almost everything.
No one dies halfway through the last act. – Heinrich Ibsen.
The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.
The freedom to apprehend aesthetic value may rise from class conflict, but the value is not identical with the freedom, even if it cannot be achieved without that apprehension. Aesthetic value is by definition engendered by an interaction between artists, an influencing that is always an interpretation.
Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left.
Hermetic angelology, studied by Corbin in his Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, posits a middle reality between sensory perceptions and divine revelations.
All of us are, as Mr. Stevens said, “condemned to be that inescapable animal, ourselves.
You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is in this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself.
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!