But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.
From Harold Bloom
In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.
Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.
Shakespeare is universal.
Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.
Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.
What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
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