Paul Fry, Defense of Poetry, p. 52 :

"We might willingly enough agree, with many of our colleagues, simply to give up formalist, traditional Marxist, and rearguard humanist efforts to define literature and settle instead for the neo-pragmatist argument that whatever you want it to be is what it is; but that argument leaves an interesting question unanswered, the question why you do invariably want it to be something, and why so many have always wanted to write or speak that something, whatever it is, not just until formal, representational, or vocational aims have been fulfilled but incessantly, with obsessive repetitiveness. From this curious fact it is almost enough to infer... that literature is coextensive with human being in defining human being, over against all other forms of sentience, as that which can never say what it wants to say."

- which reminded me of this post -