A canon is a guarded catalogue of that speech, music and art which houses inside us, which is irrevocably familiar to our homecomings. And this will include, if honestly arrived at and declared (even if solely to oneself), all manner of ephemera, trivial, and possibly mendacious matter. No man or woman need justify his personal anthology, his canonic welcomes. Love does not argue its necessities. The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart. What you know by heart, the bastards cannot touch; they cannot take it from you.
George Steiner
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