We Notice As The Bible

I Soon Realized That A Student Of English Literature Who Does Not Know The Bible Does Not Understand A Good Deal Of What Is Going On In What He Reads: The Most Conscientous Student Will Be Continually Misconstruing The Implications, Even The Meaning.

For The Serious Mediocre Writer Convention Makes Him Sound Like A Lot Of Other People; For The Popular Writer It Gives Him A Formula He Can Exploit; For The Serious Good Writer It Releases His Experiences Or Emotions From Himself And Incorporates Them Into Literature, Where They Belong.

There Is Only One Way To Degrade Mankind Permanently And That Is To Destroy Language.

It Seems Clear That The Bible Belongs To An Area Of Language In Which Metaphor Is Functional, And Were We Have To Surrender Precision For Flexibility.

What If Criticism Is A Science As Well As An Art? Not A Pure Or Exact Science, Of Course, But These Phrases Belong To A Nineteenth-century Cosmology Which Is No Longer With Us.