Most critics are so domesticated as to seem institutions--as they stand there between reader and writer, so different from either, they remind one of the Wall standing between Pyramus and Thisbe.

More from Essay, 1952

• Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and spoken for the other.
• How little they seem performances, no matter how brilliant or magical, how little things made primarily of words (or of ink and paper, either), and how much things made out of lives and the world that lives inhabit.
• The really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it.