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?'
— M. H. Abrams
Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought. The process... has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas.
The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.
If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.
Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.
The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.
I was never a monist - always a diversitarian.
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.
It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.
When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect.
Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.
When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
Jews had an outsider's eye on a lot of Western tradition.
We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.
We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.
John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.
