Influencer-Proof.

There is nothing so immediately rewarded in American life, in the arts or anything else, as a shrill and limited consciousness, resting not in peace but, as all of us will, in inevitable resignation.

Jim Harrison, from Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction

He's wrong, of course.  Where joy, adventure, and discovery inspire, this is escapable.

Learn.

Was this the horizon, at once ancient and unrealized, toward which to dream? Was an alternative psychic life of literary labor possible, one that was enabling, unanxious, less regarding of self? Was it wrong to want one? As with rich parables or figurative systems, the story Bloom tells about poetic imagination can be read in more than one direction. There’s an ambiguity that might be reclaimed if the theory isn’t allowed to calcify into a grand individualism (a calcification Bloom greatly aided). Because when you went to grasp for those great names, did you expect to contact something solid?

The modes of personhood respected by the rest of life are undermined in poetic making. A logic inhering in the material begins to suggest itself: the rudiments of soul and mind are already common property, the truth of one’s life is a tangle of known tropes. The terrain of imagination is hatched with backroads between private drives and collective form. In practice the poet toggles constantly between resisting and admitting the voices of others. Perhaps it becomes hard to know the difference. Extreme and contradictory instincts live in proximity: compared with what I love I am almost nothing; there is nothing that has ever been thought or said which does not in some respect belong to me, or I to it. To learn the voice’s capacity is to learn to inherit. What is true for a child is true, at a different depth, for the poet, who perhaps must remain a child of a kind.

CONNECT

Duty.

What we have to do, it seems to me, with children of all ages, is to have lots of exciting things lying around. Not to push them on, but to give them the time and opportunity to pick them up and play with them.

You don’t know what the outcome will be; it may be that a great poet is the outcome, it might be a person with a more broad mind than they otherwise might have had. It’s our duty as adults, it’s our duty as a nation to make sure that children – the next generation – have this opportunity.

Philip Pullman

Owes.

Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty one owes to one’s self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it.

Oscar Wilde