The Very Best Of All Merwin: I

The World Gets Older, Without Getting Either Better Or Worse And So Does Literature. But I Do Think That The Drab Current Phenomenon That Passes For Literary Studies In The University Will Finally Provide Its Own Corrective.

Everyone Wants A Prodigy To Fail; It Makes Our Mediocrity More Bearable.

The Morality Of Scholarship, As Currently Practiced, Is To Encourage Everyone To Replace Difficult Pleasures By Pleasures Universally Accessible Precisely Because They Are Easier.

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.

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