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

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.

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

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.

...the Bible itself is less read than preached, less interpreted than brandished. Increasingly, pastors may drape a limply bound Book over the edges of the pulpit as they depart from it. Members of the congregation carry Bibles to church services; the paster announces a long passage text for his sermon and waits for people to find it, then reads only the first verse of it before he takes off. The Book has become a talisman.