Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy.
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.
Wild with laughter, Twelfth Night is nevertheless almost always on the edge of violence.
Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human.
Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about...
[Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid of self-knowledge, and careening o...
You get too much at last of everything: of sunsets, of cabbages, of love.
We are lived by drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist.
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...
My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of [Stephen] King's fictions.
Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate.
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.
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...
No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.
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 ot...
You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.
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...
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...
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...
The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.