Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves…The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

Since ideology, particularly in it’s shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of...

We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

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, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How...

How to read “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better,...

For more than half a century I have tried to confront greatness directly, hardly a fashionable stance, but I see no other justification for literary criticism in the shadows of our Evening Land. Over time...

The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why...

I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.

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; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others,...

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.

Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.

(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God.

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain,...