Literary Critics

"In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now?"

"The time has probably come to admit that the notion of an avant-garde is no longer useful in discussing contemporary literature. How can there be an avant-garde without a mainstream? Avant-garde de quoi? one must ask. Establishment institutions — universities, museums, foundations, commercial galleries, even the state — have embraced the idea of experimental art for so long that the avant-garde is now a safely domesticated concept, just another traditional style."

"Like the intricately rational web of theology woven around the irrational mysteries of faith, the sober explanations of institutions for hoarding literary relics seem like elegant post-factum justifications for what is essentially a sense of sacred awe. An institution of learning seeks significant manuscripts because they possess qualities that scholarship cannot entirely reproduce — an authentic, holistic connection with the great writers of the past. It is not the intellectual content of the manuscript that is important but its material presence — ink spots, tobacco stains, pinworm holes, and foxing included."

"Being so deeply rooted in one place and culture allows a genuine writer to experiment wildly with the material without ever losing touch with its essence."

"Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes."

"What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead."

"Audiences and critics acknowledge that a play or concerto gains force in great rendition. A good play may overcome bad staging. A great concerto may survive a poor soloist. But it is naturally assumed that a more accomplished performance intensifies the impact of the work. The play's text or concerto's score does not change, but the right actors and musicians help realize its full potential. Among contemporary literary critics, however, one never encounters this notion in regard to books and printing. To recognize the sensual contributions of the physical elements of a book is somehow assumed to demean the spiritual purity of the text. To notice the book itself smacks of philistinism, and to make distinctions based on paper, binding, and typography brings accusations of elitism or decadence."

"In America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension."

"What does an instinctively popular poet do in contemporary America, where serious poetry is no longer a popular art? The public whose values and sensibility he celebrates is unaware of his existence. Indeed, even if they were aware of his poetry, they would feel no need to approach it. Cut off from his proper audience, this poet feels little sympathy with the specialized minority readership that now sustains poetry either as a highly sophisticated verbal game or secular religion. His sensibility shows little similarity to theirs except for the common interest in poetry. And so the popular poet usually leads a marginal existence in literary life. His fellow poets look on him as an anomaly or an anachronism. Reviewers find him eminently unnewsworthy. Publishers see little prestige attached to printing his work. Critics, who have been trained to celebrate complexity, consider him an amiable simpleton."

"My blessed California, you are so wise. You render death abstract, efficient, clean. Your afterlife is only real estate, And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen."

"We lived in places that we never knew. We could not name the birds perched on our sill, Or see the trees we cut down for our view. What we possessed we always chose to kill."We claimed the earth but did not hear her claim, And when we died, they laid us on her breast, But she refuses us — until we earn Forgiveness from the lives we dispossessed."

"Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry's future."

"Teach us the names of what we have destroyed."

"We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost."

"This is not work but a kind of workmanship. First out of paper, then from the body. To provoke thought into form, molded according to a measure. I think of a tailor who is his own fabric."

"This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere — like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed."

"America's first great surrealist artists were named Walt Disney, Max Fleischer, and Tex Avery. Their artistic medium was cartoon animation, though we must remember that cartoons of this era were seen not only by children but by a mixed audience, consisting mainly of adults. These men took — quite literally — the principles of surrealism and turned them into mass entertainment. As Fleischer's scantily clad Betty Boop ran through a phantasmagoric underground landscape to the driving beat of Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher," moviegoers of the Thirties saw surrealist dream-logic unfold more powerfully than in any experimental poem created in Greenwich Village. To this day the greatest moment of North American surrealism is probably Dumbo's drunken nightmare choreographed to the demonic oom-pah-pah of "Pink Elephants on Parade" from Walt Disney's 1941 movie. When the surrealist style was so quickly assimilated into mass-media comedy, what avant-garde poet could consider it sufficiently chic?"

"How many voices have escaped you until now, the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot, the steady accusations of the clock numbering the minutes no one will mark. The terrible clarity this moment brings, the useless insight, the unbroken dark."

"Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks."

"The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale."

"Twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush, scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly to find an unexpected waterfall, not half a mile from the nearest road, a spot so hard to reach that no one comes — a hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies and nesting jays, a sign that there is still one piece of property that won't be owned."

"Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica. To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper — metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember."

"Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes."

"A change was preparing and may be traced to Winchester, which, under Dr. Warton, had become a nursery of poets. If any man may be called the father of the present race, it is Thomas Warton, a scholar by profession, an antiquary and a poet by choice; and by nature one of the best tempered and happiest of men."

"The late Mr Warton, with a poetical enthusiasm which converted toil into pleasure, and gilded, to himself and his readers, the dreary subjects of antiquarian lore, and with a capacity of labour apparently inconsistent with his more brilliant powers, has produced a work of great size, and, partially speaking, of great interest, from the perusal of which we rise, our fancy delighted with beautiful imagery, and with the happy analysis of ancient tale and song, but certainly with very vague ideas of the history of English poetry... Warton's History of English Poetry has remained, and will always remain, an immense commonplace-book of memoirs to serve for such an history. No antiquary can open it, without drawing information from a mine which, though dark, is inexhaustible in its treasures; nor will he who reads merely for amusement ever shut it for lack of attaining his end; while both may probably regret the desultory excursions of an author, who wanted only system, and a more rigid attention to minute accuracy, to have perfected the great task he has left incomplete."

"All human race, from China to Peru, Pleasure, howe’er disguis’d by art, pursue."

"Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry was published in three volumes in 1774, 1778 and 1781. It was both a major landmark of scholarship and a decisive intervention in the cultural politics of its age: for the first time, the achievement of English poetry from Chaucer to the Elizabethans was retrieved and made accessible, and the ground was prepared for a shift in hegemonic style which the Romantics exploited."

"All centuries of literature swam into his learned ken. His Observations on the Faërie Queene still remains the best book ever written about Spenser."

"Ye fetted pinnacles, ye fanes sublime, Ye towers that wear the mossy vest of time; Ye massy piles of old munificence, At once the pride of learning and defence; Ye cloisters pale, that, lengthening to the sight, To contemplation, step by step, invite; Ye temples dim, where pious duty pays Her holy hymns of everlasting praise - Hail ! Oxford, hail !"

"O! what's a table richly spread Without a woman at its head!"

"We are apt to form romantic and exaggerated notions about the moral innocence of our ancestors. Ages of ignorance and simplicity are thought to be ages of purity. The direct contrary, I believe, is the case...In the middle ages, not only the most flagrant violations of modesty were frequently practised and permitted, but the most infamous vices. Men are less ashamed as they are less polished."

"Nor rough, nor barren, are the winding ways Of hoar antiquity, but strown with flowers."

"Ramallah is not Auschwitz. Israel is not the Third Reich. We have no death camps and we haven't massacred one third of the Palestinian population in gas chambers. Therefore, everything we do is quite all right. We may fill the occupied territories with tear gas and blood, we may kill and injure and torture and blackmail and dispossess, we may surround millions by electric fences and tanks in tiny enclaves, we may hold them under siege and daily bombing, we may make pregnant women walk to hospitals, and we shoot ambulances too, don't we. But as long as we fall even an inch short of the atrocities of Nazi Germany, it's all fine and good, and don't you dare make the comparison."

"The proper study of mankind is woman."

"Uncommon things must be said in common words, if you would have them to be received in less than a century."

"Nothing remains with man unless it is insinuated with some delight."

"The enthusiasm for goodness which shows that it is not the habit of the mind."

"Enough's a surfeit to the soul."

"Holy indignation is a proof that we should do the same thing ourselves, and easy tears are a certain sign of a hard heart."

"The cloud that is light to Israel is darkness to Egypt."

"As the Word of God is God's image, so the word of man is his image, and "a man is known by his speech.""

"Life's warp of Heaven and woof of Hell."

"He is irrational, however well he may be able to reason, who does not clearly see that good is good and truth truth."

"Modern Philosophers, that wisely keep to sandy shallows, like shrimps, for fear of bigger fish."

"Nothingness is capacity, and night the opportunity of light."

"The dull and heavy hate of fools."

"Creation is nothing but a concerted piece, consisting of representative repetitions and variations of and harmonious commentaries upon the simple theme, God, […] divine contrapuntal music […]. If Beethoven and Bach are but senseless noise to the untrained ears of the boy who likes to hear Balfe on the street organ; you, though you may be capable of Beethoven and Bach, should hesitate to affirm that the sphere-music is not music because to your ears it is nothing but confusion. The first step towards becoming able to hear it is, to fix your attention upon the theme, which is God."

"Man, when he is in health and order of soul and body, is Mount Olympus, and in him, so long as he confesses that he is nothing in himself, are sensibly apparent the powers and majesties, beauties and beatitudes of all Gods and Goddesses."

"Woman is the sum and complex of all nature, and is the visible glory of God.[…] The "Word made Flesh" [John 1:14] is the word made Woman."

"The history of creation, regarded by some in very early ages as probably "mythical," has, indeed, been proved to be certainly so, but the myth includes teaching of much more significance to us than the supposed history, and everyone should be glad to discover this additional proof that the aim of the writers of Scripture was not to satisfy an idle curiosity about facts which do not concern us. The doctrine of evolution promises to be of very easy assimilation by the Church."