Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the… — Camille Paglia Copy Share
Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending… — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged… — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't… — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
How many modern transsexuals are unacknowledged shamans? Perhaps it is to poets they should go for counsel, rather than surgeons. — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe. — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
A lesser complaint: hair extensions. There are moments on 'All My Children' when half the women actors, young and old, seem to be afflicted… — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning. — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
As a registered Democrat, I am praying for a credible presidential candidate to emerge from the younger tier of politicians in their late 40s.… — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
Once you have become the centre of a conflict in a complex governmental enterprise you have the obligation to resign. — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
I believe that government should confine itself to the public realm and that it should be as stripped down as possible, within reason. It… — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
I'm a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I'm an evangelist of popular culture, but when there's only media, then there's… — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
My stress on the truth in sexual stereotypes and on the biologic basis of sex differences is sure to cause controversy. — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions? — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by… — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
I respect the astute and rigorously unsentimental David Horowitz as one of America's most original and courageous political analysts. He has the true 1960s… — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
The followers of Derrida are pathetic, snuffling in French pockets for bits of pieces of a deconstructive method already massively and coherently presented and… — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
