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Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and p...more

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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

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[Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity,...more

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A play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be attained only when the protagonist can separate h...more

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There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in whic...more

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No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.

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Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

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To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory "pipe dreams" is right also.

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The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is ...more

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Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, poli...more

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Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own...more

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I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital t...more

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Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

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We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

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Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.