The Very Best Of All

At Our Present Bad Moment, We Need Above All To Recover Our Sense Of Literary Individuality And Of Poetic Autonomy.

There Is A God, And His Name Is Aristophanes.

If We Read The Western Canon In Order To Form Our Social, Political, Or Personal Moral Values, I Firmly Believe We Will Become Monsters Of Selfishness And Exploitation.

Reading The Very Best Writers—let Us Say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is Not Going To Make Us Better Citizens. Art Is Perfectly Useless, According To The Sublime Oscar Wilde, Who Was Right About Everything. He Also Told Us That All Bad Poetry Is Sincere. Had I The Power To Do So, I Would Command That These Words Be Engraved Above Every Gate At Every University, So That Each Student Might Ponder The Splendor Of The Insight.

Indeed The Three Prophecies About The Death Of Individual Art Are, In Their Different Ways, Those Of Hegel, Marx, And Freud. I Don't See Any Way Of Getting Beyond Those Prophecies.