/lit/ - Literature

16. WILLIAM BLAKE. COMPLETE POETRY.
The child of Blake's imagination is the immortal child to be found in the heart of every man and every woman. It is the child spoken of in some of his most beautiful passages, by Nietzsche himself—the child who will come at the last, when the days of the Camel and the days of the Lion are over, and inaugurate the beginning of the "Great Noon."
With a noble blasphemy dearer to God than the slavishness of many evangelical pietists, he treats the Christian legend with the same sort of freedom that the old Greek poets used.
The figure of Christ becomes under his hands, a god among other gods; a power among other powers, but one possessed of a secret drawn from the hidden depths of the universe, which in the end is destined to prevail.

17. EMILY BRONTE. WUTHERING HEIGHTS.
The love of Heathcliff and Catherine breaks the bonds of ordinary sensual or sentimental relationship and hurls itself into that darker, stranger, more unearthly air, wherein one hears the voices of the great lovers; and where Sappho and Michaelangelo and Swift and Shelley and Nietzsche gasp forth their imprecations and their terrible ecstasies. Crude and rough and jagged and pitiless, the style of this astounding book seems to rend and tear, like a broken saw, at the very roots of existence.

18. STENDHAL. THE RED AND THE BLACK.
Stendhal is one of those who has not hesitated to propound the psychological a life based upon pagan ethics. A sly observer, Stendhal lived a life of absorbing emotions, most of them intellectual and erotic. No writer has ever lived with more contempt for mere sedentary theories or a fiercer mania for the jagged and multifarious edges of life's pluralistic eccentricity.

19. PASCAL. PENSEES.
Pascal was essentially a layman. There was nothing priestly in his mood; nothing scholastic in his reasoning; nothing sacerdotal in his conclusions. We breathe with him the clear sharp air of mathematics; and his imagination, shaking itself free from all controversial pettifogging, sweeps off into the stark and naked spaces of the true planetary situation.
The imagination of Pascal once more makes life terrible, beautiful and dramatic. It pushes back the marble walls of mechanical cause and effect, and opens up the deep places. It makes the universe porous again. It restores to life its strange and mysterious possibilities. It throws the human will once more into the foreground, and gives the drama of our days its rightful spaciousness and breadth.

20. SHELLEY. COMPLETE POETRY
He is a genuine philosopher, as well as a dreamer. Or shall we say he is the only kind of philosopher who must be taken seriously—the philosopher who creates the dreams of the young?
Shelley is, indeed, a most rare and invaluable thinker, as well as a most exquisite poet. His thought and his poetry can no more be separated than could the thought and poetry of the Book of Job. His poetry is the embodiment of his thought, its swift and splendid incarnation.

>>22077179
>any sect of Christianity
is a sect of one large enough?