Literary Criticism

“The imposition of a cause’s idea of reality on the writer’s idea of reality can only mistakenly be called reading.”

Philip Roth

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

Auden