Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
John KeatsRead
Literary men are . . . a perpetual priesthood.
Interpretation
John Keats likens literary individuals to priests, suggesting they have a sacred duty to the art of literature.
In this quote, John Keats reflects on the role of literary figures as akin to a priesthood, highlighting their continuous dedication to the craft of writing and storytelling. Just as priests serve a higher purpose in spiritual matters, literary men are seen as caretakers of language and culture, responsible for preserving, interpreting, and imparting the profound truths of human experience through their works.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of writers at a literary festival.
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
Are there not thousands in the world who love their fellows even to the death, who feel the giant agony of the world, and more, like slaves to poor humanity, labor for mortal good?
Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the Letter you must write immediately, and do all you can to console me in it β make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me βwrite the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair.
Faded the flower and all its budded charms,Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise!Vanishd unseasonably
I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
...I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become more acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice.
The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim 'You know exactly what I mean!' depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.
The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.
For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.
I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.
A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.
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