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.

A sixteenth-century poet, especially one who knew that he ought to be a curious and universal scholar, would possess some notions, perhaps not strictly philosophical, about the origin of the world and its end, the...

What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate. This book wouldn’t elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest...

We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still...

The sixties began what many admirers of Eliot would consider a bleak period. The anxiety of influence of the profession at large seemed to inspire quick and increasingly uninformed dismissals of Eliot, and these repeated...

Two literary figures bridge the gap between the mediaeval age and the Renaissance. They are Sir Thomas Malory, the author of Le Morte D’Arthur, and the first ‘poet-laureate’, John Skelton. In their entirely separate ways,...

In the humanist world following Erasmus, man is at the centre of the universe. Man becomes largely responsible for his own destiny, behaviour and future. This is the new current of thought which finds its...

In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She’d much prefer to read a good book.

To return to my point about the immense power that his enemies attribute to him, Orwell once wrote about the ‘large, vague renown’ that constituted the popular memory of Thomas Carlyle. His own reputation has...

Whether he chooses a ‘scholarly’ or a ‘popular’ edition the modern reader is likely to have his judgement influenced in advance. Almost invariably he will be offered an assisted passage. Footnotes, Forewords, Afterwords serve notice...

What Kant took to be the necessary schemata of reality,’ says a modern Freudian, ‘are really only the necessary schemata of repression.’ And an experimental psychologist adds that ‘a sense of time can only exist...

Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. Virginia was 30. Soon after her marriage she suVered another breakdown and her mental health declined sporadically over the following year, culminating in a suicide attempt in September...

We have, then, three Books wholly and one partially written before, and two after, the Preface; and only one of the first four is consistent with it, while the two later are entirely in agreement...

CUSTOMER (to her friend): What’s this literary criticism section? Is it for books that complain about other books?

The ones that landed near the bathroom are Bad Tolkien imitations or transcripts of a D&D adventure; bad Herbert, Heinlein, and Asimov are below the television; and these on the bed are the ones whose...

Few poets better convey the uneasy transition from Victorianism to Modernism than Thomas Hardy. His novels, written between 1870 and 1895, made him not only the recorder of his distinctive region of ‘Wessex’, but the...

It is the voice of everyday people, rather than of a self-conscious ‘artist’, that we hear in Caedmon’s Hymn, and in such texts as Deor’s Lament (also known simply as Deor) or The Seafarer. These...

In reality the puritans and the humanists were quite often the same people.

Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.

Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among ‘intellectuals’, that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus...

It happens that in our phase of civility, the novel is the central form of literary art. It lends itself to explanations borrowed from any intellectual system of the universe which seems at the time...

The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, mythThere was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953),...

A turning point in the criticism of Hardy’s poetry came in his centenary year, in which W. H. Auden (1940) recorded his indebtedness to Hardy for his own education in matters of poetic technique………………………In a...

…If you genuinely believe that only the death of a loved one can motivate a human being to take up a cause…then get your pathetic, cynical ass out of my way so I can do...

[N]o such thing as objective writing, . . . every inscription, every traveler’s tale, every news account, every piece of technical writing, tells more about the author and his time than it does about the...

Milton argued, in 1649, after the execution of Charles I, that a people ‘free by nature’ had a right to overthrow a tyrant; a subject that recalls vividly the questions examined by Shakespeare in his...

Mankind is immortalin the comic perspective not by virtue of man’s subjugation of naturebut by virtue of man’s subjection to it. The “fall” in tragedy ends indeath; the fall in comedy ends in bed, where,...

I have tried to write about politics in an allusive manner that draws upon other interests and to approach literature and criticism without ignoring the political dimension. Even if I have failed in this synthesis,...

Nowhere is the sense of medium felt more strongly, even by the casual reader, than in a story about to end. For the novelist the problem is no longer how to tell his tale, but...

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.

The discords of our experience–delight in change, fear of change; the death of the individual and the survival of the species, the pains and pleasures of love, the knowledge of light and dark, the extinction...

Life, of course, never gets anyone’s entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way,...

It doesn’t matter whether a sequence of words is called a history or a story: that is, whether it is intended to follow a sequence of actual events or not. As far as its verbal...

The decline of sustained close reading of Eliot is also related, ironically, to the emergence of historical scholarship regarding sources and allusions. The major figure here is Grover Smith, who in the midfifties published an...

The Romantic journey was usually a solitary one. Although the Romantic poets were closely connected with one another, and some collaborated in their work, they each had a strong individual vision. Romantic poets could not...

One of the first books of travel, giving European readers some insight into the unfamiliar world of the Orient, was published in 1356-67 in Anglo-Norman French. Called simply Travels, it was said to be by...

…Shunsuké hated the preoccupation with modern psychology that judged his casual, offhand remarks or his daily actions as betraying his identity or ideas with better clarity than did his highly polished sentences.

Isaac Deutscher was best known—like his compatriot Joseph Conrad—for learning English at a late age and becoming a prose master in it. But, when he writes above, about the ‘fact’ that millions of people ‘may’...

The way contemporary literature is emerging, soon we can expect “Item poetry” in novels.

In fact this desire for consonance in the apocalyptic data, and our tendency to be derisive about it, seem to me equally interesting. Each manifests itself, in the presence of the other, in most of...

Leonard Woolf was two years older than Virginia, whom he had first met in 1901 in the rooms of her brother Thoby at Cambridge. He went from St Paul’s School to Trinity College on a...

The aim I have set before me in this book is to give back to English readers the understanding of and delight in this great poet which thrilled his contemporaries and early successors.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties...

The notion of literature as only one of several avenues to a single typeof propositional knowledge is, of course, hardly the winning ticket in lit-crit today. More typical are sentiments that see such a notion...

The beliefs and behaviour of the Restoration reflect the theories of society put forward by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, which was written in exile in Paris and published in 1651. Like many texts of...

Writers in what we now call the Middle English period (late twelfth century to 1485) did not necessarily always write in English. The language was in a state of flux: attempts were made to assert...

Attempts to connect men’s circumstances too closely with their literary productions are usually, I believe, unsuccessful.

He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup,...

Virgina Woolf versus Edward Lear.””Christ Alive,” said Billy. “Are those my only choices?””I went for Lear,” said Leon. “Partly out of fidelity to the letter L. Partly because given the choice between nonsense and boojy...

I have used the theologians and their treatment of apocalypse as a model of what we might expect to find not only in more literary treatments of the same radical fiction, but in the literary...