/lit/ - Literature

American culture is the worst thing that ever occurred on this planet. Just compare any random American book to a classic. Think about something like American Psycho and put it side by side with Il Canzoniere by Francesco Petrarca. Take an absolute piece of shit like Gravity's Rainbow and compare it with Proust's Recherche. Let's even take a closer look to something so celebrated such as the rambling, incoherent, drunken poems of Emily Dickinson. The single worst verse of Hölderlin you can find will be infinitely more rewarding. Now put on a scale plate the mediocre reflections of Emerson and the awkward enthusiasms of Whitman with which it is said American literature took its first steps, and put on the other plate the bright, warm, heart-opening and moving lines of the Canticle of the Sun by Francis of Assisi from which the entirety of Europe's national poetic traditions gushes out like a waterfall of golden light. There is no hope for Americans. Everything they are is rooted in vulgarity, in violence, in emptiness, in childishness, in cold. They are the virus that infects and rots the world.