We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.
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.
Gertrude Stein remarked that one writes for oneself and for strangers, which I translate as speaking both to myself (which is what great poetry teaches us how to do) and to those dissident readers aro...
He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.
Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.
We are great fools. He has spent his life in idleness, we say; I have done nothing today. What, have you not lived? That is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations. ...
At eighty-four, I can only write the way I go on teaching, personally and passionately.
If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.
The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self. Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a wo...
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 othe...
Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett’s canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett’s Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consci...
Gertrude Stein maintained that one wrote for oneself and for strangers, a superb recognition that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers. The Western Canon do...
I treasure ruefully some memories of W.H. Auden that go back to the middle 1960s, when he arrived in New Haven to give a reading of his poems at Ezra Stiles College. We had met several times before, i...
Like television, motion pictures, and computers, [Stephen] King has replaced reading...the triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education.
The freedom to apprehend aesthetic value may rise from class conflict, but the value is not identical with the freedom, even if it cannot be achieved without that apprehension. Aesthetic value is by d...
Denying Ahab greatness is an aesthetic blunder: He is akin to Achilles, Odysseus, and King David in one register, and to Don Quixote, Hamlet, and the High Romantic Prometheus of Goethe and Shelley in...
I cannot locate any aestetic dignity in [Stephen] King's writing: his public could not sustain it, nor could he...Art unfortunately is rarely the fruit of earnestness, and King will be remembered as a...
The defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise. . . . The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to...
The defense of the great works of Western literature can no longer be undertaken by central institutional power though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including rec...
Monsters of selfishness and exploitation. To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all. The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves a...
Showing 121 to 140 of 141 results