Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
“Modern poets like Frost still want to make 'deep' statements; but they are also more sceptical of such high-sounding generalities than many… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
“A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor,… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
“The idea that literary theorists killed poetry dead because with their shrivelled hearts and swollen brains they are incapable of spotting a… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry. — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
“It is characteristic of poetic language that it gives us not simply the denotation of a word, but a whole cluster of… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
“Literary' feelings are responses to poems, not just states of emotion which occur in their presence.” — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
Virtue is something you have to get good at, like playing the trombone or tolerating bores at parties. Being a virtuous human being takes… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly not constructive. For if the… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
“What it means to be a ‘better person’, then, must be concrete and practical — that is to say, concerned with people’s political situations… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
“What we consume now is not objects or events, but our experience of them. Just as we never need to leave our cars, so… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
“The theatre can teach us some truth, but it is the truth of the illusory nature of our existence. It can alert us to… — Terry Eagleton Copy Share Image
