Two Quotations Before I Close the Book

​The American Classics, by Denis Donoghue—one of several books I am flipping through by the author.

There was this, after proclaiming the “obvious faults” of the writing style of James Fenimore Cooper, as witnessed by contemporaries: “The prestige of Cooper as a major novelist is to be explained not by his literary power but by the need of American readers to feel that they have made their peace with the native Americans.” (I have not read Cooper, and this is not likely to entice me.)

Elsewhere he quotes the critic R.P. Blackmur from “The Politics of Human Power” (I have never read Blackmur, but snippets in passing): “There is a disorder vital to the individual which is fatal to society.”