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.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

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

...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.

I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.

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