Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy.
Wild with laughter, Twelfth Night is nevertheless almost always on the edge of violence.
You get too much at last of everything: of sunsets, of cabbages, of love.
No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.
Calling a work of sufficient literary power either religious or secular is a political decision, not an aesthetic one.
My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of [Stephen] King's fictions.
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...
We are lived by drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist.
We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substa...
Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.
One doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity not...
BLOOM: I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate.
Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, politics, or institutionalised religion. At its strong...
The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.
There are indeed millions of Christians in the United States, but most Americans who think that they are Christians truly are something else, intensely religious but devout in the American Religion, a...
Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers; and I will execute judgments in thee, and the whole remnant of thee will I scatter into all the win...
Urging the need for community upon American religionists is a vain enterprise; the experiential encounter with Jesus or God is too overwhelming for memories of community to abide, and the believer ret...
We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.
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 Shakespear...
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