14 quotes
The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
The only way to forestall the work of criticism is through censorship, which has the same relation to criticism that lynching has to justice.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
It is of the essence of imaginative culture that is transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
Poets are happier as servants of religion than of politics.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a "pure" or "exact" science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
Between religion's "this is" and poetry's "but suppose this is" there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. (p. 70)
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
Just as a new scientific discovery manifests sometimes that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)
A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)