Joseph Epstein (writer)

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“Now the entire enterprise of poetic creation seems threatened by having been taken out of the world, chilled in the classroom, and vastly overproduced by men and women who are licensed to write it by degree if not necessarily by talent or spirit. It was Wallace Stevens who once described poetry as "a pheasant disappearing in the brush." One gets a darting glint of it every once in a while in the work of the better contemporary poets, but to pretend that that meaty and delectable bird freely walks the land isn't going to get him out of hiding, not soon, and maybe not ever.”

“Where did all that elegant, potent, lovely language go; or, more precisely, where went the power to create such language? Perhaps, like W. B. Yeats in Auden's poem, it "disappeared in the dead of winter."”

“Now, for so many poets, critics, editors, small-press publishers, creative-writing programs, the chief thing seems to be keeping the patient alive.”

“Contemporary poetry, in the cumbersome new usage of the academic literary criticism of the moment, has been "privileged" — that is, in our day it has been given a special dispensation, set apart, released from the burden of undergoing tough criticism.”

“So much like a great deal of contemporary poetry: slightly political, heavily preening, and not distinguished enough in language or subtlety of thought to be memorable.”

“Doubtless the most famous poet in America is Allen Ginsberg, but poetry isn't really what he is famous for: politics and homosexuality and a talent for the outrageous and a small genius for publicity are the four cornerstones on which his fame rests.”

“Richard Wilbur, the past poet laureate, is everywhere taken for eminent, and everyone for whom poetry matters reveres him for his craftsmanship, yet Wilbur does not seem to stir passionate advocacy in his readers, except when held up as a model of the literary decorum that has been lost to poetry in its confessional, sexier, Visigothic aspects.”

“The main modernist poets had written with assurance in their bones, as if they knew their worth and knew that posterity would one day know it, too. But the poets who came after them were less sure; they knew something had gone wrong.”

“The reason "closure" is a cliché is that it is used too often, too imprecisely, and doesn't in any case reflect reality. In reality, such closure in broken friendships, and much else in life, is rarely achieved; only death brings closure, and then not always for those still living.”

“I was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established that one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt, lunacy — once you have these in place, you are set to go.”

“Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.”

“Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but that they are also good. Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, sentimental, foolish, a dope; disagree with someone on the left and he is more likely to think you sel-fish, cold-hearted, a sellout, evil — in league with the devil, he might say, if he didn't think religious terminology too coarse for our secular age.”

“I believe it was Gayelord Hauser, the nutritionist, who said, "You are what you eat," but if you happen to be an intellectual, you are what you quote.”

“We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.”

“I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single — and singular — piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.”

“We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live.”