It Is By Extending Oneself,

No Poem, Not Even Shakespeare Or Milton Or Chaucer, Is Ever Strong Enough To Totally Exclude Every Crucial Precursor Text Or Poem.

The Most Beautiful Prose Paragraph Yet Written By Any American.

We Possess The Canon Because We Are Mortal And Also Rather Belated. There Is Only So Much Time, And Time Must Have A Stop, While There Is More To Read Than There Ever Was Before. From The Yahwist And Homer To Freud, Kafka, And Beckett Is A Journey Of Nearly Three Millennia. Since That Voyage Goes Past Harbors As Infinite As Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, And Tolstoy, All Of Whom Amply Compensate A Lifetime's Rereadings, We Are In The Pragmatic Dilemma Of Excluding Something Else Each Time We Read Or Reread Extensively.

Aesthetic Value Emanates From The Struggle Between Texts: In The Reader, In Language, In The Classroom, In Arguments Within A Society. Aesthetic Value Rises Out Of Memory, And So (as Nietzsche Saw) Out Of Pain, The Pain Of Surrendering Easier Pleasures In Favour Of Much More Difficult Ones ... Successful Literary Works Are Achieved Anxieties, Not Releases From Anxieties.

Real Reading Is A Lonely Activity.