Criticism
David Lanoue maintained in 2005 that 'our image of Issa is a consciously designed literary construct...earthy, compassionate, child-and-animal loving, unconcerned about appearances or public rituals or wordly power'. While not necessarily misleading, 'his carefully crafted self-portraits...transcend autobiography'.
It has been suggested that 'Issa is often very much like Thoreau'.
Read more about this topic: Kobayashi Issa
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)