I Think The Greek New Testament Is The Strongest And Most Successful Misreading Of A Great Prior Text In The Entire History Of Influence.
But In The End, In The End One Is Alone. We Are All Of Us Alone. I Mean I'm Told These Days We Have To Consider Ourselves As Being In Society... But In The End One Knows One Is Alone, That One Lives At The Heart Of A Solitude.
No Poem, Not Even Shakespeare Or Milton Or Chaucer, Is Ever Strong Enough To Totally Exclude Every Crucial Precursor Text Or Poem.
The World Gets Older, Without Getting Either Better Or Worse And So Does Literature. But I Do Think That The Drab Current Phenomenon That Passes For Literary Studies In The University Will Finally Provide Its Own Corrective.
I Would Say That There Is No Future For Literary Studies As Such In The United States.
One Measures Oncoming Old Age By Its Deepening Of Proust, And Its Deepening By Proust. How To Read A Novel? Lovingly, If It Shows Itself Capable Of Accomodating One's Love; And Jealously, Because It Can Become The Image Of One's Limitations In Time And Space, And Yet Can Give The Proustian Blessing Of More Life.
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 That Every Possible Stance A Critic, A Scholar, A Teacher Can Take Towards A Poem Is Itself Inevitably And Necessarily Poetic.
More Even Than Southern Presbyterians And Southern Methodists, The Baptists Provided The Great Mass Of Confederate Enlisted Men.
