“There are certain single volumes of American poetry, some of them first books or early books, that carry with them a special and spiritual power; they seem to arise from a mysterious impulse and to have been written from an enormous private or artistic need.” “The poems are full of a primal sense of voice, …

Pevear spoke readily, and with confidence, about Tolstoy’s language. He said that the hardest part of starting a long project like Anna Karenina was “getting the voice,” capturing the narrative tone that will run throughout the book. “Tolstoy’s style is the least interesting thing about him, though it is very peculiar,” he said. “It seems …

“As is often said, but as often forgotten, poems are not their paraphrases, because the paraphrase does not represent the thinking process as it strives toward ultimate precision, but rather reduces the poem to summarized “thoughts” or “statements” or “meanings.” “Because the highest poetic achievement is the gaining of an unmistakable, idiosyncratic, and formally coherent …

“The ‘clumsiness’ of primitive art is the precondition of its eloquence. What it is saying could never be said with any ready-made skills. For what it is saying was never meant, according to the cultural class system, to be said…The primitive begins alone; he inherits no practice. He does not use the pictorial grammar of …

Language is always about the situation and about people involved. Regarding pragmatics, “…the utterance does not suffice to itself.” All language is dialogue; all language has a “pragmatic” purpose. (7-8). In language, there are “four cooperative principles: quantity, quality, relation, and manner.” In action, all statements are performatives. By violating the rules of speech acts …

“[W]e have only the work as evidence for the only kind of sincerity that concerns us: Is the implied author in harmony with himself–that is, are his other choices in harmony with his explicit narrative character?… A great work establishes the “sincerity” of its implied author, regardless of how grossly the man who created that …

Splitting of self is described as central to the experience of black men (DuBois, Johnson), but Johnson relates it even more closely to women. “Janie’s increasing ability to speak grows out of her ability to assume and articulate the incompatible forces involved in her own division. The sign of an authentic voice is thus not …

“You should never take up literature with the idea that you can write just as well as “everybody else”. You should begin because you are drawn to art by the need to be yourself. You cannot take pleasure in what you’ve written if it is indistinguishable from what is written by “everybody else”. At all …

As soon as I read an author, I quickly make out beneath the words a tune that in each author is different from that of others, and without realizing it I begin to “sing along,” speeding or slowing or interrupting the notes as I read, marking their measures and returns as one does when singing …

I defend “Authentic Voice” by saying that a sincere voice just fits the conscious mind while authentic voice fits the whole self. Sincerity is tinny because it leaves out parts of the self. But I hear others objecting that some tinny sincerity, especially among the naive or adolescent, may not leave anything out at all. …