Paul Fry Quotes

Authors we are in danger of accepting as gospel, whereas founders of discursivity provide permeable ideas that we can elaborate upon in a tradition of constructive dialogue.

I'm a fan or naysayer like everyone else, not an authority of any kind.

Satire about any and all professionals with a special vocabulary has been a staple of fiction and popular ridicule since the 18th century.

The rhetoric of theory is always in a bind. It pronounces ideas and denounces failures to accept or grasp them while insisting that there are no grounds either for accepting or grasping ideas.

Criticism is concerned with evaluation. There may be evaluative principles implicit in this or that form of theory, but theory in and of itself is not prescriptive.

I beg my reader to consider the "evidence" I provide for my case and perhaps feel persuaded as a result. Beyond that I make no claim.

Every original poet has a new insight, or rather introduces a new power.

I'm not only a romanticist but a romantic myself. I take it for granted the originality matters.

I myself always want to talk about "poetry," not "the poem."

The basic change in the landscape since my salad days started with the defensive rediscovery of history and politics by all the theoretically-oriented academics in the late seventies and eighties.