(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God.
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.
Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad, “tuned the English tongue.
You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.
The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.
Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.
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.
The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.
Shakespeare’s exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.
One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.
Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden
To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude.
Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes
Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.
All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.
We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.
Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.
There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.
Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.
Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.
Characters carrying the playwright’s disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.
Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.
Reading well is one of the great pleasuresthat solitude can afford you, because it isat least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.
Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.
A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity’s disorders, including the fear of mortality
Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human.
Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.
The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.
When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, “one that expects no liberation from liberation.
The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves…The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.
All canonical writing possesses the quality “of making you feel strangeness at home.
Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.
It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory.
Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for “transport”.
What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.
The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.
Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.
Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.
We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.
Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion.
Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket
At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.
To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory “pipe dreams” is right also.
I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.
A play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be attained only when the protagonist can separate his genius for expanding consciousness from his own passion for theatricality.
Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.
The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.
What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.
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.