“All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents.”
"All Literature", from Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)
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Laura Riding Jackson 42
poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer 1901–1991Related quotes
[Z. Elmarsafy, A. Bernard, D. Attwell, Debating Orientalism, https://books.google.com/books?id=VP6ARP2m-D0C&pg=PA82, 13 June 2013, Springer, 978-1-137-34111-2, 82]
“When I read, it is not acted literature; but what I write is written acting.”
Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)
Source: Let the Great World Spin
“Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.”
Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)
“It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.”
C'est avec de beaux sentiments qu'on fait de la mauvaise littérature.
Letter to François Mauriac (1929)
“Literature is no longer Necessary Teaching is left.”
Some of the Dharma (1997)
“Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.”
The Stubborn Structure, p. 84
"Quotes"
Paris Review interview (1986)
Context: Whitman to me is the most fascinating of American poets. Whitman started to write the great poetry from scratch after he had written all that junk for newspapers, the sentimental lyrical poems. All of a sudden he wrote Leaves of Grass. When I was teaching at the University of Nebraska, my friend James Miller was chairman of the English Department. He wrote the first book attempting to make a parallel between the structure of Leaves of Grass and the steps of the mystical experience as in St. John of the Cross. I was completely bowled over by this, not having been able to explain how Whitman came to write “Song of Myself,” which is unlike anything not only in American literature, but unique in all the world. The parallels to it are mystical literature. Miller tried to show that there was actual evidence for this kind of experience, which evidently happens at a particular moment in someone’s life. … When I saw the negative reaction to Whitman with the great ruling critics of the time, I couldn’t believe it. Eliot never really gave up hammering away on Whitman, neither did Pound. Although Pound makes little concessions. Whitman, you know, didn’t have any influence in this country until Allen Ginsberg came along.