Seeking comfort through continuity, as grand voices somehow hold off the permanent darkness that gathers though it does not fall.
The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.
Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.
Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.
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...
Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden
At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.
Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.
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.
Since ideology, particularly in it's shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth princ...
Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.
One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength.
One reads for oneself and for strangers.
We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.
A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality
We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies and all the sorrows of...
All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.
Real reading is a lonely activity.
What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.
The unity of a great era is generally an illusion.
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