Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

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.

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.