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Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place ‘literary’, which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, politics, or institutionalised religion. At its strongest – Johnson, Hazlitt, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and Paul Valéer, among others – it is a kind of wisdom literature, and so a meditation upon life. Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.
