Break, Blow, Burn Quotes

“Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing.”
― Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn

“What fascinated me about English was what I later recognized as its hybrid etymoogy: blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction. The clash of these elements, as competitive as Italian dialects is invigorating, richly entertaining, and often funny, as it is to Shaskespeare, who gets tremendous effects out of their interplay. The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry..”
― Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn

“My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.”
― Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn

“Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.”
― Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn

“Love is imploring humanity: Set down your burden of doubt; in perfect faith there is neither fear nor struggle.”
― Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn

“Taking the guest’s hand, Love asks, “Who made the eyes but I?” (11–12). This brilliant sally asserts that man cannot look away from God, since everything we look at—and indeed our mental faculties as well as our organs of sight—were made by God. These “eyes” include the “I” of personal identity.”
― Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn

“With its clotted jargon, circular reasoning, and smug, debunking cynicism, poststructuralism works only on narrative—on the longer genres of story and novel. It is helpless with lyric poems, where the individual word has enormous power and mystery and where the senses are played upon by rhythm, mood, and dreamlike metaphors.”
― Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn