I think it’s best to see Walt, and virtually every other imaginative writer of consequence, as issuing not edicts but invitations. Walt asks us to make his words ours, his vision our own….you can respond more actively. You can write your own poems: they can be a rebuttal to Walt, inspired by Walt, or both at once. You will not be the first to write under Whitman’s influence, far from it.
–Mark Edmundson, Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy
So long as reading is for us the inciter whose magic keys open to our innermost selves the doors of abodes into which we would not have known how to penetrate, its role in our life is salutary. But, on the other hand, reading becomes dangerous when instead of waking us to the personal life of the spirit, it tends to substitute itself for it, when truth no longer appears to us as an ideal we can realize only through the intimate process of our thought and the effort of our heart, but as a material thing, deposited between the leaves of books like honey ready-made by others and which we have only to take the trouble of reaching for on the shelves of libraries and then savoring passively in perfect repose of body and mind.
–Marcel Proust, On Reading Ruskin
