(no subject)

from De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

'Nothing is more rare in any man,' says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

(no subject)

Interesting what finds you and why.

Woolf, Lawrence, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Faulkner, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Williams, HD etc., that whole generation or so, presumably not just artists too, seem to have fallen in love with the same literature at the same ages. Doubtless the primordial figures are Dickens, Scott and Shakespeare, but in early adolescence all discover (always discover) Byron, then Shelley and Keats, then Rossetti and Whitman and Swinburne, then turn twenty. Obviously they're reading other things as well but these become their ruling spirits, a season or two each. Enthusiasm falling becomes analysis and authorities are sought, Emerson and Pater and Nietzsche. Contemporary influences set in after this, for some reason it's these that you carve your voice out of. Here the youth poets are reappraised, usually disparaged, especially Shelley, Whitman and Swinburne. They demand that you meet their intensity with your own. For the young and the dumb, your Eliot says, therefore young and dumb themselves, and adds, to be forgotten, while never forgetting them.

I wonder how it is now? Most people aren't raised inside literature anymore, so to speak. You get charmed in by someone particularly amusing or easy or flattering or "romantic"; bunny slope figures seem to include comedy/romance-Shakespeare, Poe, Sylvia Plath, Hemingway, Frost, Cummings, Dickinson, Anne Sexton, Keats, Oscar Wilde (perhaps above all). If you're gay it's often people you hear are gay; Southern for Southern, women for women etc. What was it for me, atheism? Rebellion? I tore through Camus, Voltaire, Vidal and Shaw at 18 or 19. Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat got me into poetry at 20. Once in I was suddenly on that same escalator from 100 years ago. Telescoped the youth phases into a year or two, but had the same ones, same order. Probably ten thousand pages of verse, that first year.

Bloom became my authority, secondarily Paglia. Common ones today, no? Though Pound and Eliot are still going strong. Emerson or Nietzsche too. Still run into Yvor Winters fans occasionally. Do people in the theory wing get it so personally, adopt/are adopted by their particular Frenchman?