We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.
There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
Literature is achieved anxiety.
Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.
The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.
All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.