Every original poet has a new insight, or rather introduces a new power.

The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, encyclopedic minds: Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye.

I'm a fan or naysayer like everyone else, not an authority of any kind.

I'm not only a romanticist but a romantic myself. I take it for granted the originality matters.

Criticism is concerned with evaluation. There may be evaluative principles implicit in this or that form of theory, but theory in and of itself is not prescriptive.

I don't think theory adds to criticism. (Methodology does, for better or worse.) Theory's function is to make criticism self-conscious, maybe even a little sheepish, about its ex cathedra pronouncements.

Every original poet has a new insight, or rather introduces a new power.