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The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's 'The Devils' no less than the art of Giotto or the 'Passions' of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of man and woman to the existence of the gods or of God.

George Steiner

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George Steiner
Age: 90 †
Born: 1929
Born: April 23
Died: 2020
Died: February 3
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Neuilly
Francis George Steiner
Existence
Devils
Passion
Passions
Less
Relations
Giotto
Woman
Gods
Dramatize
Art
King
Dostoevsky
Men
Relation
Inquire
Kings
Lear
Devil
Bach

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The poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energised field of association and connotation, of overtones and undertones, of rebus and homophone, surround its motion, and break from it in the context of collision .. in Western poetry so much of the charged substance is previous poetry.
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The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.
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I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.
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Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
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I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.
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Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed the claims of the ideal. These are the three stages, profoundly interrelated, through which Western consciousness is forced to experience the blackmail of transcendence.
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For it is a plain fact that, most certainly in the West, the writings, works of art, musical compositions which are of central reference, comport that which is grave and constant (Joyce's epithets) in the mystery of our condition.
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The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
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Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.
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The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.
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If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.
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Self-projection is, more often than not, the move of the minor craftsman, of the tactics of the hour whose inherent weakness is, precisely, that of originality.
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My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.
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There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.
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I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this.
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It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.
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The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter words.
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If future society assumes the contours foretold by Marxism, if the jungle of our cities turns to the polis of man and the dreams of anger are made real, the representative art will be high comedy. Art will be the laughter of intelligence, as it is in Plato, in Mozart, in Stendhal.
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The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart the expression is vital.
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There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
George Steiner