If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
From M. H. Abrams
The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.
We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.
We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.
The Romantics were whipping boys of the New Criticism, but they appealed to me anyway. I was recalcitrant. It was clear to me that they had thought innovatively.
Jews had an outsider's eye on a lot of Western tradition.
I was never a monist - always a diversitarian.
The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?'
4 perspectives
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives