My historical sequence begins with Dante and concludes with Samuel Beckett, though I have not always followed strict chronological order. Thus, I have begun the Aristocratic Age with Shakespeare, because he is the central figure of the Western Canon, and I have subsequently considered him in relation to nearly all the others, from Chaucer and Montaigne, who affected him, through many of those he influenced—Milton, Dr. Johnson, Goethe, Ibsen, Joyce, and Beckett among them—as well as those who attempted to reject him: Tolstoy in particular, along with Freud, who appropriated Shakespeare while insisting that the Earl of Oxford had done the writing for “the man from Stratford.”

Note: Montaigne at the center?

Location 66

But where are Petrarch, Rabelais, Ariosto, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Racine, Swift, Rousseau, Blake, Pushkin, Melville, Giacomo Leopardi, Henry James, Dostoevsky, Hugo, Balzac, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Browning, Chekhov, Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and so many others?

Location 73

With most of these twenty-six writers, I have tried to confront greatness directly: to ask what makes the author and the works canonical. The answer, more often than not, has turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange. Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty, but I think he characterized all canonical writing rather than the Romantics as such. The cycle of achievement goes from The Divine Comedy to Endgame, from strangeness to strangeness. When you read a canonical work for a first time you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expectations. Read freshly, all that The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Faust Part Two, Hadji Murad, Peer Gynt, Ulysses, and Canto general have in common is their uncanniness, their ability to make you feel strange at home.

Note: Strangeness as a virtue?

Location 85

The best living English critic, Sir Frank Kermode, in his Forms of Attention (1985) has issued the clearest warning I know about the fate of the canon, that is to say, in the first place, the fate of Shakespeare: Canons, which negate the distinction between knowledge and opinion, which are instruments of survival built to be time-proof, not reason-proof, are of course deconstructible; if people think there should not be such things, they may very well find the means to destroy them. Their defense cannot any longer be undertaken by central institutional power; they cannot any longer be compulsory, though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including recruitment, can manage without them. The means to destroy canons, as Kermode indicates, are very much at hand, and the process is now quite advanced. I am not concerned, as this book repeatedly makes clear, with the current debate between the right-wing defenders of the Canon, who wish to preserve it for its supposed (and nonexistent) moral values, and the academic-journalistic network I have dubbed the School of Resentment, who wish to overthrow the Canon in order to advance their supposed (and nonexistent) programs for social change. I hope that the book does not turn out to be an elegy for the Western Canon, and that perhaps at some point there will be a reversal, and the rabblement of lemmings will cease to hurl themselves off the cliffs.

Location 97

ONE MARK of an originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is a strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies. Dante is the largest instance of the first possibility, and Shakespeare, the overwhelming example of the second. Walt Whitman, always contradictory, partakes of both sides of the paradox.

Location 109

Ambivalence between the divine and the human is one of J’s grand inventions, another mark of an originality so perpetual that we can scarcely recognize it, because the stories Bathsheba told have absorbed us. The ultimate shock implicit in this canon-making originality comes when we realize that the Western worship of God—by Jews, Christians, and Moslems—is the worship of a literary character, J’s Yahweh, however adulterated by pious revisionists. The only comparable shocks I know come when we realize that the Jesus loved by Christians is a literary character largely invented by the author of the Gospel of Mark, and when we read the Koran and hear one voice only, the voice of Allah, recorded in detail and at length by the audacity of his prophet Mohammed. Perhaps some day, well on in the twenty-first century, when Mormonism has become the dominant religion of at least the American West, those who come after us will experience a fourth such shock when they encounter the daring of the authentic American prophet Joseph Smith in his definitive visions, The Pearl of Great Price and Doctrines and Covenants. Note: Supernatural and miracles, inherit strangeness, but I guess literature does not attempt to be historical; thought what about auto-fiction?

Location 134

Our educational institutions are thronged these days by idealistic resenters who denounce competition in literature as in life, but the aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to all the ancient Greeks, and to Burckhardt and Nietzsche, who recovered this truth. What Homer teaches is a poetics of conflict, a lesson first learned by his rival Hesiod. All of Plato, as the critic Longinus saw, is in the philosopher’s incessant conflict with Homer, who is exiled from The Republic, but in vain, since Homer and not Plato remained the schoolbook of the Greeks. Dante’s Divine Comedy, according to Stefan George, was “the book and school of the ages,” though that was more true for poets than for anyone else and is properly assigned to Shakespeare’s plays, as will be shown throughout this book. Contemporary writers do not like to be told that they must compete with Shakespeare and Dante, and yet that struggle was Joyce’s provocation to greatness, to an eminence shared only by Beckett, Proust, and Kafka among modern Western authors. The fundamental archetype for literary achievement will always be Pindar, who celebrates the quasi-divine victories of his aristocratic athletes while conveying the implicit sense that his victory odes are themselves victories over every possible competitor. Dante, Milton, and Wordsworth repeat Pindar’s key metaphor of racing to win the palm, which is a secular immortality strangely at odds with any pious idealism.

Note: On competing with Shakespeare; also assumes there's a single canon worth fighting for. Sure Western Cannon may be the highest; maybe a select will achieve immortality, as in, they've written so well, they will exist for as long as humans do. But local cannons, and others that may only live for X years; and then even writing even just one generation past you. Helps to have someone like Kafka as an inspiration - but not as an expectation or end. - Anxiety of influence = Radiohead

Location 143

in our schools and colleges, where all aesthetic and most intellectual standards are being abandoned in the name of social harmony and the remedying of historical injustice. Pragmatically, the “expansion of the Canon” has meant the destruction of the Canon, since what is being taught includes by no means the best writers who happen to be women, African, Hispanic, or Asian, but rather the writers who offer little but the resentment they have developed as part of their sense of identity. There is no strangeness and no originality in such resentment; even if there were, they would not suffice to create heirs of the Yah wist and Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, Cervantes and Joyce. As the formulator of a critical concept I once named “the anxiety of influence,” I have enjoyed the School of Resentment’s repeated insistence that such a notion applies only to Dead White European Males, and not to women and to what we quaintly term “multiculturalists.” Thus, feminist cheerleaders proclaim that…

Note: Reminds me of BAE and the labeling crisis; not the best essays, but the most traumatic; discerning point here: difference between creating different labeled cross-sections (ie: Best Woman Canon, Best Machine Essay Canon, Best Experimental Canon), and the idea of throwing out "best" and instead, assuming that best is not a particular quality, but trauma itself.

Location 154

There can be no strong, canonical writing without the process of literary influence, a process vexing to undergo and difficult to understand. I have never been able to recognize my theory of influence when it is under attack, since what is under attack is never even an apt travesty of my ideas.

Location 166

For Bloom, “influence” is both a tropological category, a figure which determines the poetic tradition, and a complex of psychic, historical and imagistic relations . . . influence describes the relations between texts, it is an intertextual phenomenon . . . both the internal psychic defense—the poet’s experience of anxiety—and the external historical relations of texts to each other are themselves the result of misreading, or poetic misprision, and not the cause of it.

Location 173

this examination of the now-threatened Western Canon. The burden of influence has to be borne, if significant originality is to be achieved and reachieved within the wealth of Western literary tradition. Tradition is not only a handing-down or process of benign transmission; it is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration, in which the prize is literary survival or canonical inclusion. That conflict cannot be settled by social concerns, or by the judgment of any particular generation of impatient idealists, or by Marxists proclaiming, “Let the dead bury the dead,” or by sophists who attempt to substitute the library for the Canon and the archive for the discerning spirit. Poems, stories, novels, plays come into being as a response to prior poems, stories, novels, and plays, and that response depends upon acts of reading and interpretation by the later writers, acts that are identical with the new works.

Note: On the reconfiguration of timeless themes for the current situations, ie: Goethe's Faust but in the age of technology? Conscious influence. Fusion of the timeless, the zeitgeist, and the personal. Fingreprint of the caanon, but it's source not from it. Inspiration. A figure, embedded with a strangeness, that comes through new wok.

Location 179

Coming after Shakespeare, who wrote both the best prose and the best poetry in the Western tradition, is a complex destiny, since originality becomes peculiarly difficult in everything that matters most: representation of human beings, the role of memory in cognition, the range of metaphor in suggesting new possibilities for language. These are Shakespeare’s particular excellences, and no one has matched him as psychologist, thinker, or rhetorician. Wittgenstein, who resented Freud, nevertheless resembles Freud in his suspicious and defensive reaction to Shakespeare, who is an affront to the philosopher even as he is to the psychoanalyst. There is no cognitive originality in the whole history of philosophy comparable to Shakespeare’s, and it is both ironic and fascinating to overhear Wittgenstein puzzling out whether there is an authentic difference between the Shakespearean representation of thinking and thinking itself. It is true, as the Australian poet-critic Kevin Hart observes, that “Western culture takes its lexicon of intelligibility from Greek philosophy, and all our talk of life and death, of form and design, is marked by relations with that tradition.” Yet intelligibility pragmatically transcends its lexicon, and we must remind ourselves that Shakespeare, who scarcely relies upon philosophy, is more central to Western culture than are Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

Note: "There is no cognitive originality in the whole history of philosophy compared to Shakespeare" - spiky... Shakespeare dominated a genre; conflating that for the whole enterprise of cognition

Location 200

It is a mark of the degeneracy of literary study that one is considered an eccentric for holding that the literary is not dependent upon the philosophical, and that the aesthetic is irreducible to ideology or to metaphysics. Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness. That depth of inwardness in a strong writer constitutes the strength that wards off the massive weight of past achievement, lest every originality be crushed before it becomes manifest. Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism and is founded upon a reading that clears space for the self, or that so works as to reopen old works to our fresh sufferings. The originals are not original, but that Emersonian irony yields to the Emersonian pragmatism that the inventor knows how to borrow. The anxiety of influence cripples weaker talents but stimulates canonical genius. What intimately allies the three most vibrant American novelists of the Chaotic Age—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner—is that all of them emerge from Joseph Conrad’s influence but temper it cunningly by mingling Conrad with an American precursor—Mark Twain for Hemingway, Henry James for Fitzgerald, Herman Melville for Faulkner. Something of the same cunning appears in T. S. Eliot’s fusion of Whitman and Tennyson, and Ezra Pound’s blend of Whitman and Browning, as again in Hart Crane’s deflection of Eliot by another turn toward Whitman. Strong writers do not choose their prime precursors; they are chosen by them, but they have the wit to transform the forerunners into composite and therefore partly imaginary beings.

Note: literature separate from ideology, political science, from virtue in the sense that virtues are axioms that ladder up in how to organize; literature is the sovereignty of the solitary soul; speak to the weirdness, wonder, alienation, beauty of the human condition itself; not how to act of be, but how you can feel; strangeness seems to be paramount, to Bloom—and then to tie this to influence, it's as if, when you read literature, some writer from the past will touch you in such a profound way, that you have no control in your influence of them; you see yourself in them, and you are now an agent of them, and yes, you can consciously combine with secondary influences.

Location 212

Strong literature, agonistic whether it wants to be or not, cannot be detached from its anxieties about the works that possess priority and authority in regard to it. Though most critics resist understanding the processes of literary influence or try to idealize those processes as wholly generous and benign, the dark truths of competition and contamination continue to grow stronger as canonical history lengthens in time. A poem, play, or novel is necessarily compelled to come into being by way of precursor works, however eager it is to deal directly with social concerns.

Location 226

Literature is not merely language; it is also the will to figuration, the motive for metaphor that Nietzsche once defined as the desire to be different, the desire to be elsewhere. This partly means to be different from oneself, but primarily, I think, to be different from the metaphors and images of the contingent works that are one’s heritage: the desire to write greatly is the desire to be elsewhere, in a time and place of one's own, in an originality that must compound with inheritance, with the anxiety of influence.

Note: metaphor as the differentiator through time

Location 232

Who reads must choose, since there is literally not enough time to read everything, even if one does nothing but read. Mallarmé’s grand line—“the flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books”—has become a hyperbole.

Note: Choice as a conscious effort; a balance between breadth and depth; to understand and to feel. Ultimately, a unique combination; old, new, domains - equip writer with the influence to make what they need to make for their time. Canons are useful maps, but wrong to insist that everyone must read the same canon.

Location 242

Unfortunately, nothing ever will be the same because the art and passion of reading well and deeply, which was the foundation of our enterprise, depended upon people who were fanatical readers when they were still small children. Even devoted and solitary readers are now necessarily beleaguered, because they cannot be certain that fresh generations will rise up to prefer Shakespeare and Dante to all other writers. The shadows lengthen in our evening land, and we approach the second millennium expecting further shadowing.

Location 259

Literary criticism is an ancient art; its inventor, according to Bruno Snell, was Aristophanes, and I tend to agree with Heinrich Heine that “There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.” Cultural criticism is another dismal social science, but literary criticism, as an art, always was and always will be an elitist phenomenon. It was a mistake to believe that literary criticism could become a basis for democratic education or for societal improvement. When our English and other literature departments shrink to the dimensions of our current Classics departments, ceding their grosser functions to the legions of Cultural Studies, we will perhaps be able to return to the study of the inescapable, to Shakespeare and his few peers, who after all, invented all of us.

Note: why not literary criticism for democratic education?

Location 264

Memory is always an art, even when it works involuntarily. Emerson opposed the party of Memory to the party of Hope, but that was in a very different America. Now the party of Memory is the party of Hope, though the hope is diminished. But it has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory. We need to teach more selectively, searching for the few who have the capacity to become highly individual readers and writers. The others, who are amenable to a politicized curriculum, can be abandoned to it. Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.

Note: Can we not teach the sensation of feeling, or reading, sensing, or lucid dreaming? Think there's an unfounded elitism in here. Agree in the elitism of hierarchy and that not everyone is equally capable to write themselves into the canon. And also, a hierarchy of readers, where not everyone can get complex texts in their fullest - but is there not a massive degree of improvement available to anyone to learn how to feel?

Location 272

Beneath the surfaces of academic Marxism, Feminism, and New Historicism, the ancient polemic of Platonism and the equally archaic Aristotelian social medicine continue to course on. I suppose that the conflict between these strains and the always beleaguered supporters of the aesthetic can never end. We are losing now, and doubtless we will go on losing, and there is a sorrow in that, because many of the best students will abandon us for other disciplines and professions, an abandonment already well under way. They are justified in doing so, because we could not protect them against our profession’s loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards of accomplishment and value. All that we can do now is maintain some continuity with the aesthetic and not yield to the lie that what we oppose is adventure and new interpretations.

Location 287

There is always something in advance of which we are anxious, if only of expectations that we will be called upon to fulfill. Eros, presumably the most pleasurable of expectations, brings its own anxieties to the reflective consciousness, which is Freud’s subject. A literary work also arouses expectations that it needs to fulfill or it will cease to be read. The deepest anxieties of literature are literary; indeed, in my view, they define the literary and become all but identical with it. A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity’s disorders, including the fear of mortality, which in the art of literature is transmuted into the quest to be canonical, to join communal or societal memory. Even Shakespeare, in the strongest of his sonnets, hovers near this obsessive desire or drive. The rhetoric of immortality is also a psychology of survival and a cosmology.

Note: Death and immortality as the core thing, the core disorder and preoccupation of humanity. But what else? What are the timeless drives that saturate canonical works. Strangeness. ... Also, textual immortality through themes of immortality

Location 294

At what date in the history of secular writing did men begin to speak of poems or stories as being immortal? The conceit is in Petrarch and is marvelously developed by Shakespeare in his sonnets. It is already a latent element in Dante’s praise of his own Divine Comedy. We cannot say that Dante secularized the idea, because he subsumed everything and so, in a sense, secularized nothing. For him, his poem was prophecy, as much as Isaiah was prophecy, so perhaps we can say that Dante invented our modern idea of the canonical. Ernst Robert Curtius, the eminent medieval scholar, emphasizes that Dante considered only two journeys into the beyond, before his own, to be authentic: Virgil’s Aeneas in Book 6 of his epic and St. Paul’s as recounted in 2 Corinthians 12:2. Out of Aeneas came…

Location 303

Jakob Burckhardt, in a chapter on literary fame that Curtius quotes, observes that Dante, the Italian Renaissance poet-philologist, had “the most intense consciousness that he is a distributor of fame and indeed of immortality,” a consciousness that…

Location 312

The Canon, a word religious in its origins, has become a choice among texts struggling with one another for survival, whether you interpret the choice as being made by dominant social groups, institutions of education, traditions of criticism, or, as I do, by late-coming authors who feel themselves chosen by particular ancestral figures. Some recent partisans of what regards itself as academic radicalism go so far as to suggest that works join the Canon because of successful advertising and propaganda campaigns. The compeers of these skeptics sometimes go farther and question even Shakespeare, whose eminence seems to them something of an imposition. If you worship the composite god of historical process, you are fated to deny Shakespeare his palpable aesthetic supremacy, the really scandalous originality of his plays. Originality becomes a literary equivalent of such terms as individual enterprise, self-reliance, and competition, which do not gladden the hearts of Feminists, Afrocentrists, Marxists, Foucault-inspired New Historicists, or Deconstructors—of all those whom I have described as members of the School of Resentment.

Location 319

In a chapter on “Hierarchies of Genres and Canons of Literature,” Fowler remarks that “changes in literary taste can often be referred to revaluation of genres that the canonical works represent.” In each era, some genres are regarded as more canonical than others. In the earlier decades of our time, the American prose romance was exalted as a genre, which helped to establish Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald as our dominant twentieth-century writers of prose fiction, fit successors to Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, and the aspect of Henry James that triumphed in The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove.

Note: A taxonomy of canons - ie: a capital-C canon for "The Western Canon" - but then each generaiton might have their own canon - and different canons might have no relevances to a modern condition - ie: medieval issues, faded for centuries, but suddenly, medieval studies are very relevant to the emerging 2030s. --- ease the competition --- ie; not a singular hall of greats you strive to be in.

Location 328

Ideological defenses of the Western Canon are as pernicious in regard to aesthetic values as the onslaughts of attackers who seek to destroy the Canon or “open it up,” as they proclaim. Nothing is so essential to the Western Canon as its principles of selectivity, which are elitist only to the extent that they are founded upon severely artistic criteria. Those who oppose the Canon insist that there is always an ideology involved in canon formation; indeed, they go farther and speak of the ideology of canon formation, suggesting that to make a canon (or to perpetuate one) is an ideological act in itself.

Location 354

I cheerfully agree with the motto of Dr. Johnson—“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”—yet the undeniable economics of literature, from Pindar to the present, do not determine questions of aesthetic supremacy.

Location 393

Here they confront insurmountable difficulty in Shakespeare’s most idiosyncratic strength: he is always ahead of you, conceptually and imagistically, whoever and whenever you are. He renders you anachronistic because he contains you; you cannot subsume him. You cannot illuminate him with a new doctrine, be it Marxism or Freudianism or Demanian linguistic skepticism. Instead, he will illuminate the doctrine, not by préfiguration but by postfiguration as it were: all of Freud that matters most is there in Shakespeare already, with a persuasive critique of Freud besides. The Freudian map of the mind is Shakespeare’s; Freud seems only to have prosified it. Or, to vary my point, a Shakespearean reading of Freud illuminates and overwhelms the text of Freud; a Freudian reading of Shakespeare reduces Shakespeare, or would if we could bear a reduction that crosses the line into absurdities of loss. Coriolanus is a far more powerful reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon than any Marxist reading of Coriolanus could hope to be.

Location 399

Clearly this line of inquiry begins to border on the fantastic; how much simpler to admit that there is a qualitative difference, a difference in kind, between Shakespeare and every other writer, even Chaucer, even Tolstoy, or whoever. Originality is the great scandal that resentment cannot accommodate, and Shakespeare remains the most original writer we will ever know.

Location 409

Although the poem is a biblical epic, in classical form, the peculiar impression it gave me was what I generally ascribe to literary fantasy or science fiction, not to heroic epic. Weirdness was its overwhelming effect. I was stunned by two related but different sensations: the author’s competitive and triumphant power, marvelously displayed in a struggle, both implicit and explicit, against every other author and text, the Bible included, and also the sometimes terrifying strangeness of what was being presented. Only after I came to the end did I recall (consciously anyway) William Empson’s fierce book Milton’s God, with its critical observation that Paradise Lost seemed to Empson as barbarically splendid as certain African primitive sculptures.

Note: Synthesis and primal

Location 419

THERE ARE, I suppose, only a few works that seem even more essential to the Western Canon than Paradise Lost—Shakespeare’s major tragedies, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Torah, the Gospels, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Homer’s epics. Except perhaps for Dante’s poem, none of these is as embattled as Milton’s dark work.

Location 430

But whether the writer is playful in the struggle, like Chaucer and Cervantes and Shakespeare, or aggressive, like Dante and Milton, the contest is always there. This much of Marxist criticism seems to me valuable: in strong writing there is always conflict, ambivalence, contradiction between subject and structure. Where I part from the Marxists is on the origins of the conflict. From Pindar to the present, the writer battling for canonicity may fight on behalf of a social class, as Pindar did for the aristocrats, but primarily each ambitious writer is out for himself alone and will frequently betray or neglect his class in order to advance his own interests, which center entirely upon individuation. Dante and Milton both sacrificed much for what they believed to be a spiritually exuberant and justified political course, but neither of them would have been willing to sacrifice his major poem for any cause whatever. Their way of arranging this was to identify the cause with the poem, rather than the poem with the cause. In doing so, they provided a precedent that is not much followed these days by the academic rabble that seeks…

Location 440

The issue is containment, and great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes: feminism, African-American culturism, and all the other politically correct enterprises of our moment. The thing contained varies; the strong poem, by definition, refuses to be contained, even by Dante’s or Milton’s God. Dr. Samuel Johnson, shrewdest of all literary critics, concluded rightly that devotional poetry was impossible as compared to poetic devotion: “The good and evil of Eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit.” “Ponderous” is a metaphor for “uncontainable,” which is another metaphor. Our contemporary openers-up of the Canon decry overt religion, but they call for devotional verse (and devotional criticism!) even if the object of devotion has been altered to the advancement of women, or of blacks, or of that most unknown of all unknown gods, the class struggle in the United States. It all depends upon your values, but I find…

Location 451

Paradise Lost became canonical before the secular Canon was established, in the century after Milton’s own. The answer to “Who canonized Milton?” is in the first place John Milton himself, but in almost the first place other strong poets, from his friend Andrew Marvell through John Dry den and on to nearly every crucial poet of the eighteenth century and the Romantic period: Pope, Thomson, Cowper, Collins, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats. Certainly the critics, Dr. Johnson and Hazlitt, contributed to the canonization; but Milton, like Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare before him, and like Wordsworth after him, simply overwhelmed the tradition and subsumed it. That is the strongest test for canonicity. Only a very few could overwhelm and subsume the tradition, and…

Note: a decentralized process of recognition and appraise

Location 460

SILLIEST way to defend the Western Canon is to insist that it incarnates all of the seven deadly moral virtues that make up our supposed range of normative values and democratic principles. This is palpably untrue. The Iliad teaches the surpassing glory of armed victory, while Dante rejoices in the eternal torments he visits upon his very personal enemies. Tolstoy’s private version of Christianity throws aside nearly everything that anyone among us retains, and Dostoevsky preaches anti-Semitism, obscurantism, and the necessity of human bondage. Shakespeare’s politics, insofar as we can pin them down, do not appear to be very different from those of his Coriolanus, and Milton’s ideas of free speech and free press do not preclude the imposition of all manner of societal restraints. Spenser rejoices in the massacre of Irish rebels, while the egomania of Wordsworth exalts his own poetic mind over any other source of splendor. The West’s greatest writers are subversive of all values, both ours and their own. Scholars who urge us to find the source of our morality and our politics in Plato, or in Isaiah, are out of touch with the social reality in which we live. 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. To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all. The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves. The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self. Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.

Note: the distinction between virtue and the soul, but is this right? Are not some virtues purely a matter of your own mind, disconnected from social realities? --- agree that it's not exemplary, or that, it's more like Greek theology; range of characters without a unifying moral core (non-Christian) - ironic ...

Location 471

One ancient test for the canonical remains fiercely valid: unless it demands rereading, the work does not qualify.

Note: Contrast this with essays—a far more democratic medium—a well-crafted essay is one that registered on a first read. But I don't think the two are exclusive; something that is rewarding on a first attempt, and yet also, completxity and intertextuality unfolds on each read.

Location 489

The study of literature, however it is conducted, will not save any individual, any more than it will improve any society. Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves. Subsequently, he may teach us how to accept change, in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.

Note: I don't get this. Says it will not improve, save, or make us better, but then goes on to list ways in which it will do all of those things. Aesthetics and morality can but do not have to overlap. I can find aesthetic beauty in Naked Lunch, but not try to morally emulate the Beats. Similarly, can try to morally emulate Aristotle, and find no beauty in his prose. But is not the highest form one that can move you and teach you how to live?

Location 503

All that a text, let us say the tragedy of Hamlet, shares with death is its solitude. But when it shares with us, does it speak with the authority of death? Whatever the answer, I would like to point out that the authority of death, whether literary or existential, is not primarily a social authority. The Canon, far from being the servant of the dominant social class, is the minister of death. To open it, you must persuade the reader that a new space has been cleared in a larger space crowded by the dead. Let the dead poets consent to stand aside for us, Artaud cried out; but that is exactly what they will not consent to do.

Location 512

Cultural belatedness, now an all-but-universal world condition, has a particular poignance in the United States of America. We are the final inheritors of Western tradition. Education founded upon the Iliad, the Bible, Plato, and Shakespeare remains, in some strained form, our ideal, though the relevance of these cultural monuments to life in our inner cities is inevitably rather remote. Those who resent all canons suffer from an elitist guilt founded upon the accurate enough realization that canons always do indirectly serve the social and political, and indeed the spiritual, concerns and aims of the wealthier classes of each generation of Western society. It seems clear that capital is necessary for the cultivation of aesthetic values. Pindar, the superb last champion of archaic lyric, invested his art in the celebratory exercise of exchanging odes for grand prices, thus praising the wealthy for their generous support of his generous exaltation of their divine lineage. This alliance of sublimity and financial and political power has never ceased, and presumably never can or will.

Location 528

It has taken me a lifetime of immersion in the study of poetry before I could understand why Blake and Whitman were compelled to become the hermetic, indeed esoteric poets that they truly were.

Location 539

Such a war can yield limited victories; a Four Zoas or a Song of Myself are triumphs I call limited because they drive their inheritors to perfectly desperate distortions of creative desire. The poets who walk Whitman’s open road most successfully are those who resemble him profoundly but not at all superficially, poets as severely formal as Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane. Those who seek to emulate his apparently open forms all die in the wilderness, inchoate rhapsodists and academic impostors sprawling in the wake of their delicately hermetic father. Nothing is got for nothing, and Whitman will not do your work for you. A minor Blakean or an apprentice Whitmanian is always a false prophet, making no way straight for anyone.

Note: Something here on how you can't just imitate form, you need to understand and live the sensibility; to tap into the actual underlying cognitive states and then let the form emerge, as a fusion of the influence of the original with your own mutations, discovered only through the nature of the raw content that emerges and needs shape.

Location 542

Shakespeare knows implicitly what Hazlitt wryly makes explicit: the Muse, whether tragic or comic, takes the side of the elite. For every Shelley or Brecht there are a score of even more powerful poets who gravitate naturally to the party of the dominant classes in whatever society. The literary imagination is contaminated by the zeal and excesses of societal competition, for throughout Western history the creative imagination has conceived of itself as the most competitive of modes, akin to the solitary runner, who races for his own glory.

Location 555

We are destroying all intellectual and aesthetic standards in the humanities and social sciences, in the name of social justice. Our institutions show bad faith in this: no quotas are imposed upon brain surgeons or mathematicians. What has been devaluated is learning as such, as though erudition were irrelevant in the realms of judgment and misjudgment.

Location 570

Cognition cannot proceed without memory, and the Canon is the true art of memory, the authentic foundation for cultural thinking. Most simply, the Canon is Plato and Shakespeare; it is the image of the individual thinking, whether it be Socrates thinking through his own dying, or Hamlet contemplating that undiscovered country. Mortality joins memory in the consciousness of reality-testing that the Canon induces. By its very nature, the Western Canon will never close, but it cannot be forced open by our current cheerleaders.

Location 575

Cheerleading is the power of positive thinking transported to the academic realm. The legitimate student of the Western Canon respects the power of the negations inherent in cognition, enjoys the difficult pleasures of aesthetic apprehension, learns the hidden roads that erudition teaches us to walk even as we reject easier pleasures, including the incessant calls of those who assert a political virtue that would transcend all our memories of individual aesthetic experience.

Location 580

The relation between religious and literary concepts of immortality has always been vexed, even among the ancient Greeks and Romans, where poetic and Olympian eternities mixed rather promiscuously. This vexation was tolerable, even benign, in classical literature, but became more ominous in Christian Europe. Catholic distinctions between divine immortality and human fame, firmly founded upon a dogmatic theology, remained fairly precise until the advent of Dante, who regarded himself as a prophet and so implicitly gave his Divine Comedy the status of a new Scripture. Dante pragmatically voided the distinction between secular and sacred canon formation, a distinction that has never quite returned, which is yet another reason for our vexed sense of power and authority.

Note: fame vs. immortality—reflect on this; less about active perks of fame, or about being revered for eternity, but in having had the courage to live life in a way to have discovered something useful; to make some kind of contribution

Location 585

Gertrude Stein maintained that one wrote for oneself and for strangers, a superb recognition that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers. The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called “aesthetic dignity.” One of the ineluctable stigmata of the canonical is aesthetic dignity, which is not to be hired.

Location 595

All canons, including our currently fashionable counter-canons, are elitist, and as no secular canon is ever closed, what is now acclaimed as “opening up the canon” is a strictly redundant operation.

Location 607

we have now reached the point at which a lifetime’s reading and rereading can scarcely take one through the Western Canon. Indeed, it is now virtually impossible to master the Western Canon. Not only would it mean absorbing well over three thousand books, many, if not most, marked by authentic cognitive and imaginative difficulties, but the relations between these books grow more rather than less vexed as our perspectives lengthen. There are also the vast complexities and contradictions that constitute the essence of the Western Canon, which is anything but a unity or stable structure. No one has the authority to tell us what the Western Canon is, certainly not from about 1800 to the present day. It is not, cannot be, precisely the list I give, or that anyone else might give. If it were, that would make such a list a mere fetish, just another commodity.

Note: imagining an anthology where you get excerpts of the Canon, no wholes, but considering how much influence there is, and how many themes run throughout; would it be possible to make some trippy composite, where you are shifting between Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno and The Bible and Pessoa? Some new kind of collage; LODs. LOD1. Something like a loop; and you can go deeper in on successive loops.

Location 609

We have not had an official high culture in this country since about 1800, a generation after the American Revolution. Cultural unity is a French phenomenon, and to some degree a German matter, but hardly an American reality in either the nineteenth century or the twentieth. In our context and from our perspective, the Western Canon is a kind of survivor’s list. The central fact about America, according to the poet Charles Olson, is space, but Olson wrote that as the opening sentence of a book on Melville and thus on the nineteenth century. At the close of the twentieth century, our central fact is…

Location 617

Very few working-class readers ever matter in determining the survival of texts, and left-wing critics cannot do the…

Location 625

Canons, too, are achieved anxieties, not unified props of morality, Western or Eastern. If we could conceive of a universal canon, multicultural and multivalent, its one essential book would not be a scripture, whether Bible, Koran, or Eastern text, but rather Shakespeare, who is acted and read everywhere, in every language and circumstance. Whatever the convictions of our current New Historicists, for whom Shakespeare is only a signifier for the social energies of the English Renaissance, Shakespeare for hundreds of millions who are not white Europeans is a signifier for their own pathos, their own sense of identity with the characters that Shakespeare fleshed out by his language. For them his universality is not historical but…

Location 628

Since childhood, I have enjoyed an uncanny memory for literature, but that memory is purely verbal, without anything in the way of a visual component. Only recently, past the age of sixty, have I come to understand that my literary memory has relied upon the Canon as a memory system. If I am a special case, it is only in the sense that my experience is a more extreme version of what I believe to be the principal pragmatic function of the Canon: the remembering and ordering of a lifetime’s reading. The greatest authors take over the role of "places" in the Canon's theater of memory, and their masterworks occupy the position filled by "images" in the art of memory.

Note: the power of memory for a writer; unaugmented; layer of thought

Location 636

Livelier than you are, whoever you are, these authors were indubitably male, and I suppose “white.” But they are not dead, compared to any living author whomsoever. Among us now are García Márquez, Pynchon, Ashbery, and others who are likely to become as canonical as Borges and Beckett among the recently deceased, but Cervantes and Shakespeare are of another order of vitality. The Canon is indeed a gauge of vitality, a measurement that attempts to map the incommensurate. The ancient metaphor of the writer’s immortality is relevant here and renews the power of the Canon for us. Curtius has an excursus on “Poetry as Perpetuation” where he cites Burckhardt’s reverie on “Fame in Literature” as equating fame and immortality. But Burckhardt and Curtius lived and died before the Age of Warhol, when so many are famous for fifteen minutes each. Immortality for a quarter of an hour is now freely conferred and can be regarded as one of the more hilarious consequences of “opening up the Canon.”

Location 645

The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature. We do not live by the ethics of the Iliad, or by the politics of Plato. Those who teach interpretation have more in common with the Sophists than with Socrates. What can we expect Shakespeare to do for our semiruined society, since the function of Shakespearean drama has so little to do with civic virtue or social justice?

Location 653

Shakespeare, as we like to forget, largely invented us; if you add the rest of the Canon, then Shakespeare and the Canon wholly invented us. Emerson, in Representative Men, got this exactly right: “Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato’s brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare’s. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique.”

Note: why?

Location 659

You may idealize endlessly about replacing aesthetic standards with ethnocentric and gender considerations, and your social aims may indeed be admirable. Yet only strength can join itself to strength, as Nietzsche perpetually testified.

Location 667

Both characters stem from aspects of Montaigne, and both justify Nietzsche’s savage, permanently disturbing apothegm: “That which we can find words for is something already dead in our hearts; there is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”

Note: Words from the heart as "erotic broken grammars," not yet tidied into tidy language

Location 2308

Emerson, like Nietzsche a professed disciple of Montaigne, famously said of the Essays, “Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.”

Note: Montaigne the first person to be alive in text?

Location 2312

What may be least French in Montaigne is the strangeness of his radical originality, yet it was the strangeness that made him canonical, not just for France but for the West. I always return with fresh wonder to this unrealized truth about the Western Canon: works are appropriated by it for their singularity, not because they fit smoothly into an existing order. Like every major canonical author, Montaigne startles the common reader at each fresh encounter, if only because he is unlike any preconception we bring to him. He can be interpreted as skeptic, humanist, Catholic, Stoic, even Epicurean, very nearly what you will.

Note: One quality of strangeness: duplicity, illegibility—it is unnatural for a person to be a shape-shifter, a "gas," and that is curious, discomforting, yet odd, interesting, profound to read, etc.

Location 2314

Montaigne’s Essays have scriptural status, competing with the Bible, the Koran, Dante, and Shakespeare. Of all French authors, even Rabelais and Molière, Montaigne seems the least confined by a national culture, though paradoxically he had much to do with forming the mind of France.

Location 2325

Whatever kind of writer Montaigne became, it would be grotesque to call him a religious one. There are about a dozen mentions and citations of Socrates for each appearance of Christ in the pages of Montaigne’s book. Even M. A. Screech, the one scholar who insists upon regarding Montaigne as a liberal Catholic religious writer, concludes by emphasizing that, for Montaigne, “The divine never touches human life without upsetting that natural order in which man is most at home.”

Location 2329

Eliot had the embarrassment of introducing Pascal’s Pensées, which is a bad case of indigestion in regard to Montaigne, so bad that it borders on what many would condemn as outright plagiarism. Pascal, some have surmised, wrote his Pensées with his copy of Montaigne’s Essays open before him. Whether or not this was literally true, it was an apt metaphor for Pascal’s resentful and dyspeptic cannibalizing of Montaigne’s work.

Note: confirm

Location 2360

What contaminates us is not Montaigne’s derivative skepticism but his highly original personality, the first personality ever put forward by a writer as the matter of his work. Walt Whitman and Norman Mailer are indirect descendants of Montaigne, even as Emerson and Nietzsche are his direct progeny.

Location 2378

Montaigne certainly is an original; self-consciousness had never before been expressed so fully and so well. The miracle of Montaigne is that he is almost never “self-conscious” in our current, negative sense. We do not compliment anyone by saying, “She is a self-conscious person.” Montaigne talks about himself for 850 large pages, and we want still more of him, because he represents—not everyman, and certainly no woman, but very nearly every man who has the desire, ability, and opportunity to think and to read.

Note: the alien familiarity of an unfiltered mind; alien because we never see another's mind, yet familiar because we learn how similar it is to our own.

Location 2385

Melancholy or artistic ambivalence has much to do with the aesthetic anguish at not being self-begotten, as in the case of a great poet and ruined angel, Milton’s Satan, who was Lucifer until he fell.

Location 2409

The Christian or Pauline view of death, which sees it as an abnormality brought on by the Fall, is not Montaigne’s. As Hugo Friedrich observes, Montaigne does not bother to polemicize against the Christian stance but simply ignores it as being irrelevant to him. Despite Montaigne’s devotion to Socrates, he does not share the Socratic sense of the soul’s immortality, let alone the Christian doctrine of survival after death. Nothing could be less Christian (or much funnier) than Montaigne’s advice about preparations for dying, from “Of Physiognomy,” book 3, essay 12:

"If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you, don’t bother your head about it.   We trouble our life by concern about death, and death by concern about life. One torments us, the other frightens us. It is not against death that we prepare ourselves; that is too momentary a thing. A quarter hour of suffering, without consequences, without harm, does not deserve any particular precepts. To tell the truth, we prepare ourselves against the preparations of death."

Note: Naturally, this contradicts other passages on death. Here it is a mere 15 minutes of suffering, and elsewhere, it is the anxiety of a lifetime. Neither are definitive or true. An essay is an "attempt" to write out and consider a truth that you want to metabolize. An essay is less so your definitive stance at the truth, but an attempt to weave ideas you might want to live by.

Location 2414

Montaigne insists, he does not depict being; he depicts passage, and our bodily health is a story only of passage. Experience is passage; that will become the philosophy of all literature after Montaigne, from Shakespeare and Molière to Proust and Beckett. Montaigne set out to represent his own being, only to uncover the truth that the self is passage or transition, a crossing. If self is motion, then the chronicler of the self cannot always remember what he “had wanted to say.” Wisdom is not knowledge, because knowledge, illusory in itself, falls into the “had wanted to say.” To be wise is to speak the passing, and though Montaigne always possesses a self, self is always passing into self, as tone yields to tone:

"We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things, also of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only one kind, what would he have to say? He must know how to use them together and blend them. And so must we do with good and evil, which are consubstantial, with our life. Our existence is impossible without this mixture, and one element is no less necessary for it than the other. To try to kick against natural necessity is to imitate the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook a kicking match with his mule. "

Note: first chance to witness self-transcendence in literature? Not as an abstract concept, appeal, or moral, but to witness it happening live through the medium of text? And is that what the essay is?

Location 2433

I, who boast of embracing the pleasures of life so assiduously and so particularly, find in them, when I look at them minutely, virtually nothing but wind. But what of it? We are all wind. And even the wind, more wisely than we, loves to make a noise and move about, and is content with its own functions, without wishing for stability and solidity, qualities that do not belong to it.

Note: feels very transient; did Montaigne have any exposure to eastern religions? historically, not possible. beginning of travel to Japan/China - but no eastern text in Montaigne's language - actually goes back to Plutarch—"you never step in the same self twice"—and Heraclitus on honest noticing—also a bit Epicurian/naturalism, on acceptance of being a small natural creature with limits, to stop striving for permanence ... so the ideas of no-self and impermanence, while Buddhist in appearnce, came form an introspective mind starting from a different source (Hellenism) ... or, Pyrrho, who influenced Montaigne's whole project of skepticism, did travel to Indian (326 BC) and met the "gymnosophists" (naked philosophers), either Jain or Hindu (proto-Buddhists) -- in 2015, Christopher Beckwith argued that Pyrrho's framework (things are undifferentiated, unstable, unfixed) is identical to Buddhism.

Location 2449

The essay “Of Experience,” wise as it is, matters most because its affirmations are grounded in a cognitive music not to be heard anywhere else:   It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump.   Pascal must have been reduced to considerable agony by this comic vision, which leaves no latitude for transcendental yearnings, wagers of faith, and the tragedy of a God who hides himself.

Location 2479