"We all know that, at bottom, there is no competition. In the real world, rather than the artificial..."

“We all know that, at bottom, there is no competition. In the real world, rather than the artificial hothouse of a finalists’ list, there’s no need to choose between Donne and George Herbert, between Colette and Faulkner. Each feeds a hunger in us that we first discovered when we first read them. When I was an undergraduate, first reading King Lear, I can remember vividly my teacher, Tom Edwards, pointing out that after the great sentence that cost so much to arrive at, that sums up so much of the play’s disillusion and pain—the sentence ‘Ripeness is all’—another line follows. The scene ends with this single line, a simple phrase, said by Gloucester: ‘And that’s true, too.’ In other words, the great line that sums up ‘all’ isn’t ‘all.’ There is no competition between writers because no writer—not even Shakespeare or Dante—says it ‘all.’ Art is constantly saying ‘And that’s true TOO.’”

- Frank Bidart (via mttbll)