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1 " Certainly, reading Post-Structuralist prose is a form of work, like jogging with a nail in your shoe. "
― Hugh Kenner , Mazes: Essays
2 " Chesterton never achieves a great poem because his poems are compilations of statements not intensely felt but only intensely meant. "
― Hugh Kenner , Paradox in Chesterton
3 " One senses that Hegel was possible only in German, and finds it natural that Locke in a language where large and red precede apple should have arrived at the thing after sorting out its sensory qualities, whereas Descartes in a language where grosse et rouge follows pomme should have come to the attributes after the distinct idea. "
― Hugh Kenner
4 " The remoter poetry in particular was replete with effects, an effect being something hypnotic we cannot quite understand, whiteness of moon and wave related to the setting of Time in a manner "too subtle for the intellect." And all over Europe, by the late 19th century, poets had decided that effects were intrinsic to poetry, and were aiming at them by deliberate process. By the end of the century, in France, whole poems have been made "too subtle for the intellect," held together, as effects are, by the extra-semantic affinities of their words. Picking up a name that was once thrown around as their authors, we have learned to call them "Symbolist" poems. In the Symbolist poem the Romantic effect has become a structural principle, and we may say that Symbolism is scientific Romanticism, thus an effort to anticipate the work of time by aiming directly at the kind of existence a poem may have when a thousand years have deprived it of its dandelions and its mythologies, an existence purely linguistic, determined by the molecular bonds of half-understood words. "
― Hugh Kenner , The Pound Era
5 " Henry James rhymed Fellowship with the gesture of biting a neglected apple, and Ovid a scarlet curtain with the skin of Atalanta. "
6 " You can replace a man for one year with a ghost, but not the ghost the subsequent year. "
