The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate….

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach….

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;….

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented….

Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may….

I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens a….

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism wi….

We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space….

... 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 w….

Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, ….

I have read all of Daniel Aaron's books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for whi….

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is..

It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential..

The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent..

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States..

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, accord….

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike.

I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron..

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem..

Shakespeare is universal..

Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironie….