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.
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.
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...
Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.
At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.
A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality
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...
Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden
Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.
King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.
One reads for oneself and for strangers.
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 dithy...
No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.
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...
We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.
One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength.
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.