The Very Best Of All Merwin: I

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.

Personality, In Our Sense, Is A Shakespearean Invention.

But In The End, In The End One Is Alone. We Are All Of Us Alone. I Mean I'm Told These Days We Have To Consider Ourselves As Being In Society... But In The End One Knows One Is Alone, That One Lives At The Heart Of A Solitude.

Shakespeare Will Not Make Us Better, And He Will Not Make Us Worse, But He May Teach Us How To Overhear Ourselves When We Talk To Ourselves... He May Teach Us How To Accept Change In Ourselves As In Others, And Perhaps Even The Final Form Of Change.

Read Deeply, Not To Believe, Not To Accept, Not To Contradict, But To Learn To Share In That One Nature That Writes And Reads.