Daily Inspiration Quote by Carl Clinton Van Doren

Originality is the only real immortality Van Doren is willing to grant, and even that comes with a sting. “The first writers” aren’t just early chronologically; they’re first in the sense that matters to a critic: the ones who name the thing before it has a name, who invent the angle of vision that later talent can only refine. His line has the clipped severity of someone who has spent a lifetime watching reputations rise, solidify, and then get filed away.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of literary culture’s consolation prizes. To end up “in anthologies” sounds like survival, but Van Doren frames it as a kind of afterlife as excerpt: a few polished paragraphs, removed from the living argument of a whole book, preserved less because anyone still needs you than because a syllabus or editor requires you. The “long run” matters; he’s talking about time’s cruelty, how it separates influence from excellence. Second-rate innovators can outlast first-rate followers simply because they were there when the form was still malleable.

Contextually, this is a critic from an era when canons were being built in earnest: modernism rewriting the rules, universities standardizing “great books,” magazines manufacturing fame. Van Doren’s skepticism cuts through that machinery. It’s not anti-craft; it’s anti-derivative comfort. He’s warning writers that competence is not a legacy strategy, and warning readers that what we remember is often less “best” than “first to make the map.”