Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Fitzgerald

Reading, for Robert Fitzgerald, isn’t tourism. It’s theft with taste. His line sketches a “more serious” account of influence: the moment a poem stops being an artifact you admire and becomes a resource you quietly annex. That word “appropriates” is the tell. It refuses the romantic story of inspiration as lightning and replaces it with a grittier mechanism: you encounter a cadence, a clarity, a hardness of image, and it hooks into your own sensibility so tightly you start to think in it. You don’t merely learn from the poem; you draft it into your identity.

Fitzgerald’s context matters. As a major translator (especially of Homer), he lived inside other people’s masterpieces long enough to know that “reproducing” a quality is never simple copying. Translation is sanctioned appropriation: you carry over not just meaning but pressure, music, velocity. So his statement doubles as a defense of the writer’s inevitable borrowing and a warning about its ethical and artistic stakes. The “quality” is the real contraband - not the plot or the metaphor, but the internal engine: the way a line turns, the kind of attention it demands, the emotional temperature it sustains.

The subtext is almost clinical: talent is partly an ability to recognize what you need, then remake it until it sounds like you. Fitzgerald isn’t endorsing plagiarism; he’s describing how tradition actually moves - by private acts of desire, disguised as craft.