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

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

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

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.