Literary critic Helge Krog says in a 1932 essay that if literature has value as literature, it is because it expresses "something newly seen, something newly experienced, something newly recognized."

Later in the same essay, he seems to retract everything when he, using Copernicus, Darwin, Marx, and Freud as examples, says that "in the entire history of the world, new thoughts or new ideas have never been first presented in literary form." In the retraction, Krog seems to see literature in an educational role, where "new thoughts and ideas are *converted* into living literature, -- into poetry, into images, into human narrative, into general understanding if you will" to make it accessible to a broader audience.

Perhaps he would parry the contradiction by claiming that by translating ideas into "literature, that is, direct portrayal, images, fragments of life itself," one sees and recognizes them in a new way. The essay is interesting because it raises questions about what and how literature may comprehend.