or rip the whole thing up

You know I'm already sick of that fragment I was calling Anglophile. The problem was that the words were good but they were just paint on someone else's wall. I should've settled for bad words on a new wall, like 'integrity' or 'submersion', because the truth is people have no time for walls or words or paint, they're in love with impressions and accidents and dancing round a fire. You can't understand Shelley by reference to political theory or the rules of prosody. You understand Shelley by reading the poems, by walking while you read the poems, by trying to write them, by talking to yourself, by pretending to be Shelley. Nobody achieves anything without pretending to be someone else. That's what trips you up, that's where Anglophile fell down, I was so busy trying to be so many people I didn't know what foot to put in front of the other. Besides, I've still got a lot I want to do without words. It seems kind of dumb to claim to be a writer if you only use words. There was too much in there that was trying to mean something. I should've aspired to nothing.

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