August 10, 2011
"During the night I had thought of something Keats had said about Robert Burns. How a luxurious imagination deadens its delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable. For the first Americans were surrounded by thick forests, and then they were surrounded by things attainable, and these were just as thick. The problem became one of faith—faith in the equal sovereignty of the imagination."

— Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift