I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
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In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
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We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.
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What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
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