Canno fodder: Denouncing the classics

[Ikhide]

 

"Perhaps the real question here is what we mean when we use the word “classic,” and how much reverence it should command. There have been a number of attempts to give the word a definition. In an essay from 1850, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, sometimes considered the forefather of modern criticism, offered this charmingly exalted summation:

A true classic, as I should like it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered; who has expressed his thought, observation, or invention in no matter what form, only provided it be broad and great, refined and sensible, sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken in his own peculiar style, a style which is found to be also that of the whole world, a style without neologism, new and old, easily contemporary with all time."

 

 

Fascinating read by Sam Sacks about critics and classics. I enjoyed it. Here, enjoy ;-) 

- Ikhide

 

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