Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for transport.
King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.
I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without...
Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.
Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.
According to the myth, Prometheus steal fire to free us; Iago steals us as fresh fodder for the fire.
Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden
Real reading is a lonely activity.
Reading well is one of the great pleasures
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.
The unity of a great era is generally an illusion.
The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.
A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality
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...
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...
At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.
There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.
Thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt be any more.
Seeking comfort through continuity, as grand voices somehow hold off the permanent darkness that gathers though it does not fall.
No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.