Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket

Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion.

All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.