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Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the p...more

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Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.

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The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

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Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

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The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

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Originality must compound with inheritance.

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What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.

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Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket

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Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes