Literary Critics

"To cut with a sharp knife a bright green watermelon on a big scarlet plate of a summer afternoon. Ah, is this not happiness?"

"冬夜饮酒，转复寒甚，推窗试看，雪大如手，已积三四寸矣。不亦快哉！"

"To find accidently a handwritten letter of some old friend in a trunk. Ah, is this not happiness?"

"I wake up in the morning and seem to hear some one in the house sighing and saying that last night some one died. I immediately ask to find out who it is, and learn that it is the sharpest, most calculating fellow in town. Ah, is this not happiness?"

"It has been raining for a whole month and I lie in bed in the morning like one drunk or ill, refusing to get up. Suddenly I hear a chorus of birds announcing a clear day. Quickly I pull aside the curtain, push open the window and see the beautiful sun shining and glistening and the forest looks like having a bath. Ah, is this not happiness?"

"A traveller returns home after a long journey, and he sees the old city gate and hears the women and children on both banks of the river talking his own dialect. Ah, is this not happiness?"

"To open the window and let a wasp out of the room. Ah, is this not happiness?"

"It seems that in writing a composition, one must first have in mind a reason for writing. If there is a reason behind it, no matter what one writes about, it will turn out to be excellent writing. If there is no reason behind it, there is no way to write. Even if one can produce something, it will be as dry and unpleasant as chewing wax."

"The Western Wing is not a work written by an individual named Wang Shifu alone; if I read it carefully, it will also be a work of my own creation, because all the words in The Western Wing happen to be the words that I want to say and that I want to write down."

"Eat pickled turnips with yellow beans. It gives the taste of walnut."

"Even the blandest (or bluffest) “scholarly work” fears getting into trouble: less with the adversaries whose particular attacks it keeps busy anticipating than through what, but for the spectacle of this very activity, might be perceived as an overall lack of authorization. It is as though, unless the work at once assumed its most densely professional form, it would somehow get unplugged from whatever power station (the academy, the specialization) enables it to speak. Nothing expresses—or allays—this separation anxiety better than the protocol requiring an introduction to “situate” the work within its institutional and discursive matrix. The same nervous ritual that attests a positive dread of being asocial — of failing to furnish the proper authorities with one’s papers, and vice versa — places these possibilities at an infinite remove from a writing whose thorough assimilation, courted from the start, makes it too readable to need to be read much further."

"Women are present as well as men in Shahnameh, the masterpiece of Ferdowsi."

"I knew Ferdowsi in his respect of women and family and never saw that he reduces the value of family in his precious masterpiece."

"The default designation of poetry has become written poetry. That's why we have to prefix the adjective "oral," because the unmodified noun no longer covers anything but written poetry. That's also why we resort to other unwieldy phrases to pigeonhole events and phenomena that our cultural proclivities have silently eliminated from consideration. Thus a "poetry reading" describes a performance (from a published text, of course) before a well-behaved, often academic audience. Thus "spoken-word poetry"—so redundant from a historical perspective—identifies voiced verbal art, verse that is lifted off the page and into the world of presence and experience."

"To put it most simply, the oral traditional idiom persisted because—even in a written incarnation—it offered the only avenue to the immanent poetic tradition, the invisible but ever-present aesthetic context for all of the poems."

"We know now that cultures are not oral or literate; rather they employ a menu or spectrum of communicative strategies, some of them associated with texts, some with voices, and some with both."

"A good night for the fireplace to be crackling with flames - or so he figured, Crumpling the papers he could only see As testimonials to long plateaus of emptiness."

"Only by discarding a diet based on rotting corpses could men become sane. The fantasy of needing a blood-diet, a corpse-diet, was inseparable from the distorted relation to the parents I had been trying to clarify in myself and which one way or another existed in everyone. The corpse-eater was still in fantasy feeding on the parents. We discussed these ideas and decided to eat no more meat, no more animal products of any kind (such as milk, cheese, eggs) and to discard mineral salt. Apart from a few extreme applications of our position, when I tried to eat such nauseous things as raw potatoes, we found that we felt very much better in health."

"For he has seen a road by healing watersHushed into wintry slate against the sand,And spoken there with the wind's elfin daughters,And mingled in their dusty saraband.He has known winds that blow from blossomy closes,Rich with the fruity smell of summertide,And kissed warm faery lips... Now he reposes,While we are not quite certain he has died."

"The probing knife of madnessCan start a dullard brain;Cold cheeks feel kissesAnd warm with tears again"

"Then let my skeleton soulWrithe upward from its loam,Drink red morning again,And look gently home."

"Then no soft arms could hold me from my wilderness To reap at daylight's fallow edge, with bullet or knife,That flicker of hoof or pelt, that flash of wings returning -The dogs trace it - harvest of life that gives me life."

"Father remembered the wild pigeons crowdingBeech groves, mast-rich. The flutter in boughs, the cloudDarkening all, a hurricane circling and surging.Eye lost count, ear could not measure sound.Mind hurled measureless with them, feathered the sky."

"This is an autumn when they come no more.Beech leaves yellow and fall, the beech-mast rotsUneaten. Infertile now the beechHollows its heart, begetting naught.There is frost on the grandson's eyes,And only rumor upon the skies..."

"The whispering in the marrow spreads to the brain;The remembering heart carries it round againTill it beats in the throat, the lips, the weeping eyeAnd is born at last in a blazing wordless outcry."

"Farewell,Army of Tennessee! Rough glory, rooted here,Feeds the lone vow, the lingering touchOf a late comrade sworn to remember you!Lights glow from river and town. The darkness stabs.And winter sweeps the undefended earth."

"We mourned with you then in brotherhood,And I'll weep with you now for those whose namesBurn on your monuments like altar flames."

"Why did my father write? I know he sawHistory clutched as a wraith out of blowing mistWhere tongues are loud, and a glut of little soulsLaps at the too much blood and the burning house."

"The seed of Appomattox blooms; its fruitRots where eyes are dazed with a hungry searching,And ears are deaf with steps that murmur and followNo command."

"We, too, have names that blaze on mouldering stoneAnd I have seen men's tears fall where they sleptAnd heard a shouting while I wept,A century off yet louder in my earThan all that's so much magnified and near."

"I want the word that burns into my heartLike God's coal alive on the Prophet's tongue.I would listen now while memory is ablazeTo seal your testament within my soul."

"Something stirs that once had life. It dropsInto the stream, a last act of faith.Seedballs of sycamore, incautious leaves of willow,These have outstayed their autumn, teasing deathOnly so far, not yet beyond all patience.Now they let go."

"The sky drips its spectral And Gods, like men, to soot revert.Gone is the mild, the serene air.The golden years are come too late.Pursue not wisdom or virtue here,But what blind motion, what dim lastRegret of men who slew their pastRaised up this bribe against their fate."

"This was the first Book I ever read with that Juvenile Avidity so delicious during the racy Season of Life. I felt its Beauties, repeated its Precepts,—wearied my Parents with Quotations and my Tongue with Praises of this—shall I call it unlucky Volume, which made a Writer & a Critic of H:L:P."

"He that peruses Homer, is like the traveller that surveys mount Atlas; the vastness and roughness of its rocks, the solemn gloominess of its pines and cedars, the everlasting snows that cover its head, the torrents that rush down its sides, and the wild beasts that roar in its caverns, all contribute to strike the imagination with inexpressible astonishment and awe. While reading the Aeneid is like beholding the Capitoline hill at Rome, on which stood many edifices of exquisite architecture, and whose top was crowned with the famous temple of Jupiter, adorned with the spoils of conquered Greece."

"It were to be wished that no youth of genius were suffered ever to look into Statius, Lucan, Claudian, or Seneca the tragedian; authors who, by their forced conceits, by their violent metaphors, by their swelling epithets, by their want of just decorum, have a strong tendency to dazzle and to mislead inexperienced minds, and tastes unformed, from the true relish of possibility, propriety, simplicity, and nature. [...] If I might venture to pronounce so rigorous a sentence, I would say, that the Romans can boast of but eight poets who are unexceptionably excellent,—namely, Terence, Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Phaedrus. These only can be called legitimate models of just thinking and writing. Succeeding authors, as it happens in all countries, resolving to be original and new, and to avoid the imputation of copying, become distorted and unnatural. By endeavouring to open an unbeaten path, they deserted simplicity and truth; weary of common and obvious beauties, they must needs hunt for remote and artificial decorations..."

"There is no doubt whatever that as far as common law is concerned, the Courts in this country have been bound, most of them, by inflexible rules handed down in great measure from the time of the Plantagenets, and until certain modern statutes were passed there was no possibility of altering or improving them."

"The picture of law triumphant and justice prostrate, is not, I am aware, without admirers. To me it is a sorry spectacle. The spirit of justice does not reside in formalities, or words, nor is the triumph of its administration to be found in successfully picking a way between the pitfalls of technicality. After all, the law is, or ought to be, but the handmaid of justice, and inflexibility, which is the most becoming robe of the latter, often serves to render the former grotesque. But any real inroad upon the rights and opportunities for defence of a person charged with a breach of the law, whereby the certainty of justice might be imperilled, I conceive to be a matter of the highest moment."

"Every Court has the power to vary its own orders which are drawn up mechanically in the registry or in the office of the Court—to vary them in such a way as to carry out its own meaning, and where language has been used which is doubtful, to make it plain. I think that power is inherent in every Court. Speaking of the Courts with which I have been more familiar all my life, the Common Law Courts, I have no doubt that that can be done, and I should have no doubt that it could also be done by the Court of Chancery."

"Mankind naturally give evidence to the constituted Courts, and reputation is incurably damaged by their decisions, whether erroneous or not."

"... selon le mot de Talleyrand, la trahison est une question de dates ..."

"En politique, a dit Anatole France, il n'y a pas de traîtres; il n'y a que des perdants."

"Joachim Kaiser, the czar of German music critics..."

"The word "Silence" today sounds "bridegroom" or the "tragedy of love"."

"There the critic Joachim Kaiser has ruled as King for a long time, and his tendentious but impressively presented utterances tend to be treated as gospel by large sections of the German music world."

"Regardless of his general opinion of critics, he did read their reviews. There was usually no reply from him, even in private. But he was provoked once. His rejoinder was hilarious. His subject? Joachim Kaiser, author of a review of a concert that Carlos had given in Munich. Kaiser closed his review by comparing Carlos to his father: "If Kleiber, then Erich." In private, Carlos answered. "If Kaiser, then Schmarrn.""

"The preference for [the term] 'queer' represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalizations; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal. ... For both academics and activists, 'queer' gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual. ... The insistence on 'queer' ... has the effect of pointing out a wide field of normalization, rather than simple intolerance, as the site of violence."

"Hirsch's poems are compassionate , reverential , sometimes relievingly ruthless."

"Examples of Hirsch poems"

"Extract links Hirsch's 'Poets Glossary'"