Man Of Letters

🇺🇸Vladimir Nabokov

Literature

modernism

1912–1977

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

🇬🇧Anthony Burgess

Music

1917–1993

"The window opened gently and a still Autumn night entered cat-like. Edwin smelt freedom and London autumn – decay, smoke, cold, motor oil."

🇺🇸Sheldon Pollock

Literature

b. 1948

"There is nothing remarkable about the people in premodern South Asia having a clear and accurate conception of the spatial organization of their world."

🇬🇧Terry Eagleton

Literature

New Left

b. 1943

"The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present."

🇨🇭John Pentland Mahaffy

Literature

1839–1919

"With Alexander the stage of Greek influence spread across the world."

🇺🇸X. J. Kennedy

Literature

1929–2026

"I am one of the endangered species: people who still write in meter and rime."

"John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. I like to read Archie Ammons, my great friend. And Harold Bloom, another former student."

🇿🇦André Brink

Literature

Sestigers

1935–2015

"In love, no question is ever preposterous."

"One way of looking at poetic periods is to notice what contemporary interests and knowledge penetrate the best verse written at the time and what moods are permitted in treating of these matters."

🇺🇸Eknath Easwaran

Religion

1910–1999

"We all need joy, and we can all receive joy in only one way, by adding to the joy of others."

🇬🇧Stephen Potter

Literature

1900–1969

"Talk of the "imperial decay" of your invalid port. "Its gracious withdrawal from perfection, keeping a hint of former majesty withal, as it hovers between oblivion and the divine Untergang of infinite recession."

🇨🇳Xu Yuanchong

Education

1921–2021

"The best way to regain poetry is to recreate it."

🇺🇸Charles Bernstein

Literature

b. 1950

"Bibliography at Electronic Poetry Center"