AND I FORGOT EAGLETON!

"Literature was important not only in its self, but because it encapsulated creative energies which were everywhere on the defensive in modern "Commercial" society. In literature, and perhaps in literature alone, a vital feel for the creative uses of language was still manifest, in contrast to the philistine devaluing of language and traditional culture blatantly apparent in "mass society." The quality of society's language was the most telling index of the quality of its personal and social life: a society which had ceased to value literature was one lethally closed to the impulses which had created and sustained the best of human civilization."(Eagleton 55)