Editor’s note: The following remarks were delivered at The New Criterion’s gala on April 23, 2014 honoring Professor Kagan with the second Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society. They were concluded by a brief question-and-answer section, excerpts of which are included here.

It has been common in my lifetime to be informed and reminded of the special, autonomous place of artists and art, and especially of literature, apart from and above politics. Its power comes from its ability to choose its own subject, style, and purpose. Literature that is shaped merely by its author’s time and his place within his society, by their prejudices and purposes, is said to be a poor and weak thing that deserves the social scientific analysis and pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo that pass for literary criticism in our day.

But true literary artists are not bound by such things. They see through and beyond the prejudices and passions of their own time and place and are bound only by the limits that bind all human beings at all times in all places: the reality of nature and of human nature. There is a natural world outside of human will and desire; man’s genius can manipulate it to a considerable extent, and the results can be wonderful, but they are inevitably constrained by the enormous power and mystery of nature and by the limits imposed by man’s own nature. The words of the tragic poet Sophocles in his drama Antigone