A bee upon a briar-rose hung
And wild with pleasure suck’d and kiss’d;
A flesh-fly near, with snout in dung,
Sneer’d, ‘What a Transcendentalist!’
“I went to Oxford in 1979 to study classics and philosophy; I wanted the kind of formation that lunatic Pound had had, I also wanted to be able to tell a good argument from bad. So I spent an unconscionable amount of time reading the whole of Homer in Greek, the whole of Virgil in Latin (among many others); I decided at one point that I could not know anything about Greek tragedy unless I had read all extant texts, so I read the whole of Greek tragedy one summer. I didn’t have much money; I didn’t have much of a social life.”
Helen DeWitt