More Even Than Southern Presbyterians And Southern

The World Does Not Get To Be A Better Or A Worse Place; It Just Gets More Senescent.

We All Fear Loneliness, Madness, Dying. Shakespeare And Walt Whitman, Leopardi And Hart Crane Will Not Cure Those Fears. And Yet These Poets Bring Us Fire And Light.

Criticism Starts - It Has To Start - With A Real Passion For Reading. It Can Come In Adolescence, Even In Your Twenties, But You Must Fall In Love With Poems.

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 Without Stalin.

What Is Literary Tradition? What Is A Classic? What Is A Canonical View Of Tradition? How Are Canons Of Accepted Classics Formed,and How Are They Unformed? I Think That All These Quite Traditional Questions Can Take One Simplistic But Still Dialectical Question As Their Summing Up: Do We Choose Tradition Or Does It Choose Us, And Why Is It Necessary That A Choosing Take Place, Or A Being Chosen? What Happens If One Tries To Write, Or To Teach, Or To Think, Or Even To Read Without The Sense Of A Tradition? Why, Nothing At All Happens, Just Nothing.