Johns Hopkins University Alumni

"Writing, I crushed an insect with my nail And thought nothing at all. A bit of wing Caught my eye then, a gossamer so frail And exquisite, I saw in it a thing That scorned the grossness of the thing I wrote. It hung upon my finger like a sting."

"A leg I noticed next, fine as a mote, "And on this frail eyelash he walked," I said, "And climbed and walked like any mountain-goat.""

"Then in my heart a fear Cried out, "A life — why, beautiful, why dead!" It was a mite that held itself most dear, So small I could have drowned it with a tear."

"As a third generation American I grew up with the obsessive idea of personal liberty which engrosses all Americans except the oldest and richest families."

"The public has an unusual relationship to the poet: It doesn't even know that he is there."

"Words like “spokesman” and “touchstone” took me completely by surprise. For very real reasons. Not only had I been out of the country when my first two books were published, but I have always been “out of the country” in the sense that I never had what ordinarily is thought of as a literary life, or been part of a literary group. What psychiatrists nowadays call a support system. I never had any of that and still don’t."

"I always had this feeling — I’ve heard other Jews say — that when you can’t find any other explanation for Jews, you say, “Well, they are poets.” There are a great many similarities. This is a theme running all through my stuff from the very beginning. The poet is in exile whether he is or he is not. Because of what everybody knows about society’s idea of the artist as a peripheral character and a potential bum. Or troublemaker. Well, the Jews began their career of troublemaking by inventing the God whom Wallace Stevens considers the ultimate poetic idea. And so I always thought of myself as being both in and out of society at the same time. Like the way most artists probably feel in order to survive — you have to at least pretend that you are “seriously” in the world. Or actually perform in it while you know that in your own soul you are not in it at all. You are outside observing it."

"Whitman to me is the most fascinating of American poets. Whitman started to write the great poetry from scratch after he had written all that junk for newspapers, the sentimental lyrical poems. All of a sudden he wrote Leaves of Grass. When I was teaching at the University of Nebraska, my friend James Miller was chairman of the English Department. He wrote the first book attempting to make a parallel between the structure of Leaves of Grass and the steps of the mystical experience as in St. John of the Cross. I was completely bowled over by this, not having been able to explain how Whitman came to write “Song of Myself,” which is unlike anything not only in American literature, but unique in all the world. The parallels to it are mystical literature. Miller tried to show that there was actual evidence for this kind of experience, which evidently happens at a particular moment in someone’s life. … When I saw the negative reaction to Whitman with the great ruling critics of the time, I couldn’t believe it. Eliot never really gave up hammering away on Whitman, neither did Pound. Although Pound makes little concessions. Whitman, you know, didn’t have any influence in this country until Allen Ginsberg came along."

"Influence is strange. Because one can be influenced powerfully in every way but technique. For instance, I would think Walt Whitman probably had more influence on my whole poetic thinking than anybody, but I never dreamed of trying to write in the Whitman manner."

"I was at Notre Dame just a few years ago, and one of the professors there said to me, “You don’t know what effect In Defense of Ignorance had. It ripped the whole academic community in half!” I’m glad I wrote the book. I like it, and I still stand by my observations, although I wouldn’t write it so violently now. I guess I really am in the Whitman tradition."

"I feel that after working a long time, I’ve really learned how to do what I do. I enjoy it. I don’t think there’s anything more satisfying than turning out a good stanza or a good piece of prose. And when you’re satisfied enough, you want to show it to other people. That’s called publication."

"Shapiro is back where he started half a century ago: on the outside, looking in. If the canon has changed drastically, Shapiro has not. At almost age eighty, he still heroically, if sometimes quixotically, wields his verbal weapons against real and imagined enemies, still using for his motto Thoreau's "If I have anything to regret, it is my good behavior.""

"Karl Shapiro's poems are fresh and young and rash and live; their hard clear outlines, their flat bold colors create a world like that of a knowing and skillful neoprimitive painting, without any of the confusion or profundity of atmosphere, of aerial perspective, but with notable visual and satiric force. The poet early perfected a style, derived from Auden but decidedly individual, which he has not developed in later life but has temporarily replaced with the clear Rilke-like rhetoric of his Adam and Eve poems, the frankly Whitmanesque convolutions of his latest work. His best poem — poems like "The Leg," "Waitress," "Scyros," "Going to School," "Cadillac" — have a real precision, a memorable exactness of realization, yet they plainly come out of life's raw hubbub, out of the disgraceful foundations, the exciting and disgraceful surfaces of existence."

"You've always been my favorite editor because you're not like an editor at all."

"I picked up one day a book by Karl Shapiro-a little thin white book. I opened it and something he said made sense. It was, "Poetry doesn't make Cadillacs.""

"Like Jarell, Shapiro was a poet who felt like "stating his opinion or expressing his pleasure or disdain for something that had occurred [or] which should not have occurred" … As editor of Poetry Shapiro was faithful to this approach. Instead of asking professional critics to review or write articles for Poetry, he mainly evaluate their peers. … On several occasions Shapiro had made it seem as if these literary rows just befell him, as if he were accidentally stuck in the middle of two opposing camps that each had an ax to grind. However, he was not quite that innocent."

"It was only in college, when I read a poem by Karl Shapiro beginning "To hate the Negro and avoid the Jew/ is the curriculum," that it flashed on me that there was an untold side to my father's story of his student years."

"The fire put an end to the typically bustling business activities in downtown Beijing. But its psychological impact was much stronger than the financial losses. It left the Beijing residents in a constant state of terror and fear...Most missionary properties, residences of the foreign teachers at the Imperial University and the Eastern and the Southern Cathedrals were reduced to aches. Many Chinese priests and christian converts perished together in the roaring flames."

"We believe in a strong dollar … Chinese financial assets are very safe."

"Hyperinflation is not going to happen in this country, will never happen... The Fed putting so much money into the system is not going to create the risk of hyperinflation in the future. We have a strong independent Federal Reserve with a very strong mandate from the Congress, and they will do what's necessary to keep inflation low and stable over time."

"I believe deeply that it's very important to the United States, to the economic health of the United States, that we maintain a strong dollar."

"This plan will work."

"So I think the reason that the newspapers are going quiet on this is the Fed broke the law. And it wants to continue breaking the law. And that's why these Wall Street banks fought so hard to get the current head of the Fed reappointed, [[Jerome Powell|[Jerome] Powell]], because they know that he's going to do what [Timothy] Geithner did under the Obama administration. He's loyal to the New York City banks, and he's willing to sacrifice the economy to help the banks."

"We have parts of our system which are overwhelmed by regulation. It wasn't the absence of regulation that was the problem. It was despite the presence of regulation you got huge risks built up."

"As instanced by Virgil and Dante, the vocation of artisthood bears some analogy to those of mythic-herohood and messiahship—conspicuously so for the Romantics and the great early Modernists, with their characteristic conception of the artist as hero (one recalls James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, originally named Stephen Hero, vowing to "forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race"), more modestly so even for Postmoderns. In at least some cases, the present author's included, one's apprentice sense of calling may be far from clear. even to oneself. … One may be uncertain of both one's vocation and one's talent for it, or confident of one of those but not the other, or confident of both but mistaken, or doubtful of both but mistaken, or correct on one or both counts. In the happiest case, one comes to have reasonable faith in both calling and gift and at least some "objective" confirmation that that faith is not altogether misplaced. But "real, non-scripted life" is slippery terrain, in which templates and prophecies are ill-defined, elastic, arguable, and verdicts are forever subject to reversal. One crosses one's fingers, invokes one's muse and does one's best."

"[B]y writing an Aenead that combines an Odyssey with an Iliad, Virgil gives the impression of wanting to outdo the Homer of whom he is the self-conscious heir and to whom his Latin epic is also a homage, just as Augustan Rome is at once the cultural heir and political master of classical Greece. You want to be a great epic poet? Here are your models. Virgil follows them—programmatically but not slavishly—and because he happens to be a great epic poet, his Aenead turns out to be not a monumental Case-1 imitation of the great model, but a great epic poem. Thirteen centuries later, Dante compounds the stunt, taking as his literal and figurative guide not "unselfconscious" Homer but self-conscious (and Homer-conscious) Virgil, and not only scripts himself into the wandering hero role but orchestrates his own welcome … into the company of the immortals—in a Limbo, moreover, where they must ineluctably remain, but from which he will proceed through Purgatory to Paradise. Talk about chutzpah! Happening to be a great poet, Dante brings the thing off."

"[R]eading a splendid writer, or even just a very entertaining writer, is not a particularly passive business. An accomplished artist is giving us his or her best shots, in what she or he regards as their most effective sequence—of words, of actions, of foreshadowings and plot-twists and insights and carefully prepared dramatic moments. It's up to us to respond to those best shots with our minds and hearts and spirits and our accumulated experience of life and of art."

"The ascendancy of the novel is historically associated with the ascendancy of the middle class and the spread of general literacy, and those in turn, in the West at least, with the development of the institutions of liberal democracy and the civil state. … No doubt I am being both biased and superstitious, but because of that historical connection I think of the novel (and, by extension, of general literacy) as a canary in the coal mines of democratic civil society. … If this particular canary really does go belly-up, I'm old-fashioned enough to fear for the general civic air."

"[T]he essentially human characteristic of general intellectual curiosity interests itself in the demonstration of previously unremarked interconnections between apparently disparate phenomena, as part of our ongoing project of making sense of the world. Somewhat different, and more rigorous, is the novelist's So what? … [T]he best artists have a keenly intelligent feel, however intuitive, for just [such] demonstrable interconnections …, and for the relevance of those interconnections not only to their own artistic practice but to the circumstance of being humanly alive and vigorously sentient in a particular historical time and place."

"The Romantics enthusiastically and optimistically rejected neoclassical forms; the Postmodernists are just as likely to embrace such forms, although the embrace is seldom unskeptical or unironic, however impassioned it may be underneath its coolness."

"[O]ne does not write a truly contemporary novel … merely by writing about contemporary matters. … One writes a contemporary novel by writing it in a contemporary way."

"There is a popular misconception of the Romantics as rebelling against all formal constraints in favor of untrammeled freedom (as in their fondness for "wild" gardens" around those "broken" columns), and indeed we have heard Schlegel's Julius explicitly rejecting "all that … we call 'order'" in his Lucinde project. But it is clear that in fact he and his creator have a veritable passion for form — in Wallace Stevens's famous phrasing, a "rage for order" — and that what they're rejecting is only certain "conventions" of order and form. I prefer to think of Schlegel as a "romantic formalist" — a term that I apply to myself as well — and I will venture to say that the principal difference between Romantic romantic formalism and Postmodernist romantic formalism is that the latter, more than the former, inclines to the ironic (though impassioned) reorchestration of older conventions — including the classical and the neoclassical — rather than to their rejection in favor of "new" forms."

"[A]rtistic Meisterstücken, even less-than-Meisterstücken, have always been points of departure for "solitary meditation and contemplation," to a degree depending, I suppose, on the particular Meisterstück, the particular reader, viewer, or auditor, and the particular circumstances of their encounter."

"[While] we have only one life, nevertheless that one life ("that massive datum," John Updike calls it in his memoir Self-Consciousness) lends itself to any number of stories — and I'm speaking here not of fabrications but of sincere, straightforward factual accounts. Another way to put it is that any life's story can be told in any number of ways, depending on the teller's "handle," or angle of view, or lens. In fact, of course, the same applies to fictional characters: people made out of words in a novel or words and images on a screen."

"Life teaches the storyteller his themes and subject matter; literature teaches him how to get a handle on them: what has been done already, what might be done differently, what's a story anyway, and what is to be found in the existing inventory of situations, attitudes, characters, tonalities, forms, and effects accumulated over four thousand years of written literature."

"Our ability to experience life may be more or less limited by inexperience of art as well as vice versa, since each tends to increase the wattage of the great illuminator of both — namely the imagination."

"A "limited imagination," as I understand it, gets things wrong. From its mere incapacity, like limited intelligence or limited physical strength, it fails to anticipate accurately and to come up with the really new or more effective idea. Never mind that even the most powerful imagination may not be literally unlimited. … In the literary sphere, limited imagination is likely to be limited to the most conventional and obvious: a mere lack of originality in the material, the form, the treatment."

"[G]ood readers read the lines and better readers read the spaces."

"A book is what gets me off: something with heft to it, that you can take in two hands and spread like a woman. Mnyum!"

"The story of our life is not our life. It is our story."

"We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them."

"I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist."

"The simple burden of my essay ["The Literature of Exhaustion"] was that the forms and modes of art live in human history and are therefore subject to used-upness, at least in the minds of significant numbers of artists in particular times and places: in other words, that artistic conventions are likely to be retired, subverted, transcended, transformed, or even deployed against themselves to generate new and lively work. I would have thought that point unexceptionable. But a great many people … mistook me to mean that literature, at least fiction, is kaput …That is not what I meant at all. … [L]et me say at once and plainly that …literature can never be exhausted, if only because no single literary text can ever be exhausted — its "meaning" residing as it does in its transactions with individual readers over time, space, and language. …What my essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" was really about, so it seems to me now, was the effective "exhaustion" not of language or of literature, but of the aesthetic of high modernism: that admirable, not-to-be-repudiated, but essentially completed "program" of what Hugh Kenner has dubbed "the Pound era." In 1966/67 we scarcely had the term postmodernism in its current literary-critical usage — at least I hadn't heard it yet — but a number of us, in quite different ways and with varying combinations of intuitive response and conscious deliberation, were already well into the working out, not of the next-best thing after modernism, but of the best next thing: what is gropingly now called postmodernist fiction; what I hope might also be thought of one day as a literature of replenishment."

"[T]he vocation of writing seriously involves the continuous and deep examination of one's own experience of life and the world, and of the language and literary conventions we use to register that experience and make it meaningful."

"I don't think it's a good idea, as a rule, for artists to explain their art, even if they can. Jorge Luis Borges puts it arrogantly: God shouldn't stoop to theology. A modern painter put it more politely and poetically: Birds have no need of ornithology."

"Consider that if the novelist is like God and a novel like the universe, then the converse ought to have at least some some metaphorical truth: The universe is a novel; God is a novelist! (I have observed elsewhere that the trouble with God is not that He's a bad novelist; only that He's a realistic one, and that dates Him.) [Footnote:] But also keeps bringing Him back into fashion."

"Is a man a salvage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile manners? Or is salvagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?"

"'Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion."

"Women thought me charmingly shy, and sometimes stopped at nothing to “penetrate the disdainful shell of my fear,” as one of their number put it. Often as not, it was they who got penetrated."

"[F]or me, self-consciousness vitiates creation. A writer like John Barth deliberately plays with self-consciousness; I doubt that Barth thinks much of my writing, and I don't take pleasure in his, but I know he knows what he's doing and I respect him for it."