Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald gives you a strangely intimate picture of reading: not as passive consumption, but as a draft workshop where the dead refuse to stay dead. The “poet…looking over your shoulder” is less ghost story than quality control. It captures the unnerving sensation that great writing installs a second conscience in your head, one that keeps asking whether your choices are merely acceptable or actually true to the work.

The phrasing is deliberately colloquial - “now, how would this go for him?” - as if interpretation were a practical matter, like tailoring. That casualness is the point. Fitzgerald, best known for his translations (especially Homer), is describing the translator’s and reader’s real job: to host another mind without turning it into a ventriloquist act. The subtext is ethical. You don’t get to use a poet as raw material for your own cleverness; you’re accountable to an imagined presence that can’t correct you, which makes your accountability stricter, not looser.

It also smuggles in a theory of craft. “Would this do or not?” isn’t about vibes; it’s about fit, cadence, proportion - the small decisions that separate a version from a betrayal. Fitzgerald’s context is a mid-century literary culture obsessed with fidelity versus freedom in translation, but the remark works more broadly because it names the reader’s best instinct: treating style as evidence of a person, and treating that person with the respect of getting it right.