The Surrender to Literature

Thomas Allen, "Recover" 2003

‘You don’t really criticize any author to whom you have not surrendered yourself … Even just the bewildering minute counts; you have to give yourself up, and then recover yourself, and the third moment is having something to say, before you have wholly forgotten both surrender and recovery. Of course the self recovered is never the same as the self before it was given.’
TS Eliot to Stephen Spender