If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.
When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.
I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit.
You always want to read something that everybody says has gone too far, don't you? That's supposed to not just be charting our decline, but embodying it?
America is not in decline.
Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.
By a series of violent shocks, the nations in succession have struggled to shake off the Past, to reverse the action of Time and the verdict of success, and to rescue the world from the reign of the dead.
America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?
When a country is strong... it accepts any dose of pessimism from its writers.