Melville remains one of the best American examples of how every important writer is foremost an indefatigable reader of golden books, someone who kneels at the altar of literature not only for wisdom, sustenance, and emotional enlargement, but with the crucial intent of filching fire from the gods.
… But we Americans have once again confused the incessant with the important, and somewhere along the line millions of our citizens have taken the illogical leap from being able to sign their names and send an email to the belief that they can write novels, which is rather like deciding to swim the English Channel simply because you’re able to take a bath. They haven’t realized that just as a successful violinist must train her ear in Bach or Stéphane Grappelli, a successful novelist must spend decades training herself in canonical literature. When Samuel Johnson said that “the greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book,” he wasn’t exaggerating.
… Art must pass through art to realize itself and endure. What is Harold Bloom’s notorious theory of “the anxiety of influence” if not a command that we become wiser readers, wiser lovers of poetic tradition, Sherlock-Holmesian text detectives? For Bloom, every “strong” poet is engaged in psychic “agon” with a strong poet who came before because every strong poet unconsciously knows he is “belated,” too late to be original. “Without Tennyson’s reading of Keats,” Bloom writes, “we would have almost no Tennyson.” As on Darwin’s battlefield, agon leads to evolution. An animal’s struggle for survival eventually builds a better beast. A writer’s struggle with classics eventually builds a better book.
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