I Am Naive Enough To

Criticism Starts - It Has To Start - With A Real Passion For Reading. It Can Come In Adolescence, Even In Your Twenties, But You Must Fall In Love With Poems.

It Is By Extending Oneself, By Exercising Some Capacity Previously Unused That You Come To A Better Knowledge Of Your Own Potential.

The Second, And I Think This Is The Much More Overt And I Think It Is The Main Cause, I Have Been Increasingly Demonstrating Or Trying To Demonstrate That Every Possible Stance A Critic, A Scholar, A Teacher Can Take Towards A Poem Is Itself Inevitably And Necessarily Poetic.

Real Reading Is A Lonely Activity.

I Won't Say He [shakespeare] 'invented' Us, Because Journalists Perpetually Misunderstand Me On That. I'll Put It More Simply: He Contains Us. Our Ways Of Thinking And Feeling-about Ourselves, Those We Love, Those We Hate, Those We Realize Are Hopelessly 'other' To Us-are More Shaped By Shakespeare Than They Are By The Experience Of Our Own Lives.