22 quotes
A great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists.
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
It is rare for a novel to have an ending as good as its middle and beginning...
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
A person is a process, one that leads to death...
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
Auden is able to set up a We (whom he identifies himself with — rejection loves company) in opposition to the enemy They...
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that “the way it really was” half the time is, and half the time isn’t, the way it ought to be in the novel.
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
We never step twice into the same Auden. — HERACLITUS
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
Christina Stead has a Chinese say, “Our old age is perhaps life’s decision about us” — or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything — I am being sympathetic, not satiric — for the very best reasons.
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
One thinks with awe and longing of this real and extraordinary popularity of hers [Edna St. Vincent Millay’s]: if there were some poet — Frost, Stevens, Eliot — whom people still read in canoes!
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
...just as great men are great disasters, overwhelmingly good poets are overwhelmingly bad influences.
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
...modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can’t get it, let him eat Browning...
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it...
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form.
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
...habits are happiness of a sort...
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, “That were to consider it too curiously.”
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody’s hair stand on end; he is always crying: “But he hasn’t any clothes on!” about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed.
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
Sam is a repetitive, comic process that merely marks time: he gets nowhere, but then he doesn’t want to get anywhere. Although there is no possibility of any real change in Sam, he never stops changing: Sam stays there inside Sam, getting less and less like the rest of mankind and more and more like Sam, Sam squared, Sam cubed, Sam to the nth.
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
The motto of his [Robinson Jeffers’s] work is “More! More!” — but as Tolstoy says, “A wee bit omitted, overemphasized, or exaggerated in poetry, and there is no contagion”; and Frost, bearing him out, says magnificently: “A very little of anything goes a long way in a work of art.”
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)