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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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The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

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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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The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.

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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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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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Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

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Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

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All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.

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

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It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory.

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

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Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.