also see as the first round of unfair competition. Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Stephen Crane (1871–1900), and Raymond Roussel (1877–1933) all self-published notable works—just as Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) self-published some commercially successful ones (the Tarzan series, for example). But that is only to say that, for them, the competition began after publication, not before.
The other important fact—important enough that I would call it the second pole of my personal aesthetic, as Begeisterung is the first—is that literary competition is not a zero-sum game with a single winner, or even a ranked list of winners—that all-too-naive image of the canon in which, say, Shakespeare has first place and the gold cup, followed by Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) with the silver, in second place, Milton (1608–74) with the bronze, in third, with Spenser (c. 1552–99) and Joyce competing for who gets fourth and who gets fifth … The concept of literary quality is an outgrowth of a conflictual process, not a consensual one. In the enlarged democratic field, the nature of the conflict simply becomes more complex. Even among the most serious pursuers of the aesthetic, there is more than one goal; there is more than one winner. Multiple qualities and multiple achievements are valued—and have been valued throughout the history of the conflicting practices of writing making up the larger field called the literary. That multiplicity of achievement can value Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), and Samuel Beckett (1906–77), G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), Seamus Heaney (b. 1939), and Meridel Le Sueur (1900–1996), George Orwell (1903–50), and Joanna Russ (b. 1939), Nathanael West (1903–40), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), and Nella Larsen (1891–1964), Edmund White (b. 1940), and Grace Paley (b. 1922), Junot Díaz (b. 1960), Vincent Czyz (b. 1963), John Berger (b. 1926), and Willa Cather (1876–1947), Susan Sontag (1933–2004), J. M. Coetzee (b. 1940), Dennis Cooper (b. 1953), Amy Hempel (b. 1951), Michael Chabon (b. 1964), Ana Kavan (1901–68), Sara Schulman (b. 1958), and Kit Reed (b. 1954), Josephine Saxton (b. 1935), Erin McGraw (b. 1957), Harlan Ellison (b. 1934), Luiza Valenzuela (b. 1938), Mary Gentle (b. 1956), Shirley Jackson (b. 1919), JT Leroy (b. 1980), Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937), Linda Shore (b. 1937), Amy Bloom (b. 1953), Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929), Vonda N. McIntyre (b. 1948), Carol Emshwiller (b. 1921), Leonora Carrington (b. 1917), Lynn Tillman (b. 1947), L. Timmel Duchamp (b. 1950), Richard Yates (1926–92), Andrea Barrett (b. 1954), David Foster Wallace (b. 1962), Heidi Julavitz (b. 1968), Ben Marcus (b. 1967), Michael Martone (b. 1955), Hilary Bailey (b. 1936), Christine Brooke-Rose (b. 1923), Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947), Adam Haslett (b. 1970), Anita Desai (b. 1937), Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), and Raymond Carver (1938–88), Malcolm Lowry (1926–66), and Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), Tillie Olsen (b. 1912), and Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), Robert Glück (b. 1945?), and André Gide (1869–1951), Chris Offut (b. 1958), and Denis Johnson (b. 1959), James Joyce, Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), Lewis Carroll (1832–98), and Chester Himes (1909–84), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), and Wilson Harris (b. 1921), and Jean Rhys (c. 1890–1970), and John Crowley (b. 1943), Rikki Ducornet (b. 1943), Richard Wright (1908–60), and Djuna Barnes (1892–1982), Walter Pater (1839–94), Olive Shreiner (1855–1920), Thomas M. Disch (b. 1939), and Paul Goodman (1911–72), Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and Rebecca Brown (b. 1955), Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), and Georg Büchner (1813–37), Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), and Naguib Mahfouz (b. 1911), Mary Caponegro (b. 1975), Marianne Moore (1887–1972), and Henri de Mantherlant (1895–1972), Melvin Dixon (1950–92), Daryl Pinckney (b. 1948), Roger Zelazny (1937–95), Randall Kenan (b. 1963), and Don Belton (b. 1956), Guy Davenport (1927–2005), and D. H. Lawrence (1888–1930), Hart Crane (1899–1931), and Jean Toomer (1897–1968), Ethan Canin (b. 1960), William Gass (b. 1924), Bruce Benderson (b. 1955), Ursule Molinaro (1923–2000), Paul West (b. 1930), Alan Singer (b. 1948), James Alan McPherson (b. 1943), Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954), Breece D’J Pancake (1879–1952), Michael Moorcock (b. 1939), and R. M. Berry (b. 1947), Edward Gibbon (1737–94), Richard Powers (b. 1957), John Galsworthy (1867–1933), and James Gould Cozzens (1903–78), Steve Erickson (b. 1950), Brian Evenson (b. 1966), Knut Hamsun (1859–1952), and Victor Hugo (1802–85), and any of the three hundred or five hundred or fifteen hundred others any literate reader would have to add to such a list. The greater their literacy, the more names they will add—and the more they will disagree over. Indeed, such a list only becomes useful as we read its biases and blindnesses, its gaps, its errors, its incompletenesses. The diversity and difference among such lists make the literary field rich and meaningful—not some hierarchical order that might initially generate one such list or another. Difference and diversity as much as education and idiosyncrasy will always defeat and shatter such a hierarchy after more than six or seven names are forced into it.
And that’s a good thing, too.
When you have read widely among these indubitably good writers, you must make an average image for yourself of their inarguably talented work—and realize that is what your own work must be better than. And you must realize as well, one way or another, that is what they are all (or were all)—living and dead—doing.
IV
Begeisterung was formulated and written about by a group of Germans some two hundred years ago. But the nature of the literary world has changed mightily since.
I’ve already used the phrase “the enlarged democratic field.” But what exactly are we talking about? Today the functionally literate population is more than fifty times the size it was 190 years ago in 1814, which is to say just at the time when ideas from Germany such as Begeisterung were first making their way through England and France both. It was after the Napoleonic wars but before the mid-nineteenth-century republican revolutions in Europe and the Civil War in the United States.
The Revolution of 1848 in France and the other uprisings within a few years of it throughout the continent (and, a dozen years later, the American Civil War) were armed battles between wealth concentrated in the old-style widespread agricultural capitalist system and wealth concentrated in the new-style widespread industrial capitalist system. Both in Europe and the United States, these conflicts were brought on by rising populations and changing technologies. First in Europe, then in the United Sates, new-style industrialism won.
Today a far higher percentage of the world’s population lives in cities than ever before. Public education has made advances that would have been inconceivable a century ago, much less two centuries. In England toward the end of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the major poets of that time numbered six: Wordsworth (1770–1850), Coleridge (1772–1834), Blake (1757–1827), Byron (1888–24), Keats (1795–1821), and Shelley (1792–1822), all of whom were writing in the year 1814.
By general consensus some fourteen poets of considerable, if minor, interest were also writing then: Robert Southey (1774–1843), poet laureate in his day but known now only as the poet Lewis Carroll parodied in some of his Alice and Wonderland poems; Thomas Moore (1779–1852) was as famous as his close friend Lord Byron was in his day; he allowed Byron’s journals to be burned—and is himself now unread, although his Irish Melodies receives a passing mention in Joyce’s “The Dead”; during his lifetime Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) was far better known as a poet than a novelist; his novels all appeared anonymously and he did not acknowledge their authorship till 1827; also there is Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), mostly of interest because he figures so importantly in Keats’s biography. He was far better known than Keats during his lifetime. As well as his famous statement of radical reformist religious thought, “Abou Ben Adhem,” he wrote a charming poem to Thomas Carlyle’s wife, Jane, that sticks in the mind, “Jenny Kissed Me”:
Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who loves to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that
