Shakespeare Is Universal.

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.

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

I Realized Early On That The Academy And The Literary World Alike - And I Don't Think There Really Is A Distinction Between The Two - Are Always Dominated By Fools, Knaves, Charlatans And Bureaucrats.

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.

I Have Read All Of Daniel Aaron's Books, And Admired Them, But In The Americanist I Believe He Has Composed An Intellectual And Social Memoir For Which He Will Be Remembered. His Self-portrait Is Marked By Personal Tact And Admirable Restraint: He Is And Is Not Its Subject. The Americanist Is A Vision Of Otherness: Literary And Academic Friends And Acquaintances, Here And Abroad. Eloquently Phrased And Free Of Nostalgia, It Catches A Lost World That Yet Engendered Much Of Our Own.