Information Is Endlessly Available To Us; Where

I Have Never Believed That The Critic Is The Rival Of The Poet, But I Do Believe That Criticism Is A Genre Of Literature Or It Does Not Exist.

The Very Best Of All Merwin: I Have Been Reading William Since 1952, And Always With Joy.

What Is Literary Tradition? What Is A Classic? What Is A Canonical View Of Tradition? How Are Canons Of Accepted Classics Formed,and How Are They Unformed? I Think That All These Quite Traditional Questions Can Take One Simplistic But Still Dialectical Question As Their Summing Up: Do We Choose Tradition Or Does It Choose Us, And Why Is It Necessary That A Choosing Take Place, Or A Being Chosen? What Happens If One Tries To Write, Or To Teach, Or To Think, Or Even To Read Without The Sense Of A Tradition? Why, Nothing At All Happens, Just Nothing.

We Read Not Only Because We Cannot Know Enough People, But Because Friendship Is So Vulnerable, So Likely To Diminish Or Disappear, Overcome By Space, Time, Imperfect Sympathies, And All The Sorrows Of Familial And Passional Life.

I Am Not Unique In My Elegiac Sadness At Watching Reading Die, In The Era That Celebrates Stephen King And J.k. Rowling Rather Than Charles Dickens And Lewis Carroll.