Lee A. Jacobus

“And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of confes- 11
sion and self- analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always
a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that
it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt;
money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all
these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels
and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert
finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or
that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And
so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A
curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. “Mighty poets in their misery dead” — that is the burden of their
song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and
probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.
But”
― Lee A. Jacobus, A World of Ideas