All about us flourishes the new illiteracy, the illiteracy of those who can read short words or words of hatred and tawdriness but cannot grasp the meaning of language when it is in a condition of beauty or of truth. ‘ I should like to believe,’ writes one of finest modern critics, ‘that there is a clear proof of the need, in our particular society a greater need than ever before, for both scholars and critics to do a particular job of work: the job of putting the audience into a responsive relation with the work of art: to do the job of intermediatory.’ Not to judge or to anamotize, but to mediate.

Only through the critic’s constant anguished recognition of the distance which separates his craft from that of the poet, can such mediation be accomplished.

It is a love made lucid through bitterness: it looks on miracles of creative genius, discards their principles of being, exhibits these to the public, yet knows it has no part, or merely the slightest, in their actual creation.

– George Steiner

For, in the long run, whatever the poet’s કphilosophy,ક્ક however wide may be the extension of his meaning ડ્ઢ like Milton’s ptolemaic universe in which he didn’t believe ડ્ઢ by his language shall you know him; the quality of his language is the valid limit of what he has to say.

– Allen Tate

A work of art has in it no idea which is separable from the form.

– T. J. Everets