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Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for "transport".

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Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

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When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, "one that expects no liberation fr...more

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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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A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality

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Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.

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One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes s...more

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Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

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Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge.

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King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.