What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man ...
For all his claims to be just a propagandist, [Bernard Shaw's] writing has an effect nearer to that of music than most of those who have claimed to be writing "dramas of feeling." His plays are a joy to watch, not because they purport to deal with so...
no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.
If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in , Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to...
Coleridge’s description of Iago’s actions as "motiveless malignancy" applies in some degree to all the Shakespearian villains. The adjective means, firstly, that the tangible gains, if any, are clearly not the principal motive, and, secondly, tha...
After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, she produces another law by which any alien who conspires against the life of a Venetian citizen forfeits his goods and places his life at the Doge’...
