On Dead White Men

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." - Soren Kierkegaard

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BEATTIE: In one of your essays you were quoting, I believe it was Adrienne Rich, talking about not needing to know Yeats’s voice.

BERRY: Well, that wasn’t an ignorant statement; it was a political statement, and I understand that. But there are people who think they don’t need to read Yeats or Shakespeare or Milton. Some people who think those people don’t need to he read are reaching literature in English departments.

BEATTIE: A lot of people think they shouldn’t be read because they’re “dead white men".

BERRY: They are dead white men.

BEATTIE: So that somehow negates them.

BERRY: Yes, and people who talk that way don’t acknowledge their very considerable debts to dead white men who, after all, kept alive this idea of individual worth, and individual dignity. and individual freedom.

BEATTIE: It’s replacing one prejudice for another.

BERRY: Yes, all that’s very regrettable. The question of who is alive can’t be settled by category. Some allegedly dead white men are more alive than some people who are allegedly living.

--- Conversations with Kentucky Writers / L. Elisabeth Beattie (ed.)