More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.

Real reading is a lonely activity.

Literature is achieved anxiety.

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

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

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

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.