So Much Genius, So Little Talent

“Reputations born of hyperbole must gather ever more hyperbolic hyperbole unto themselves, else they die (and take their fabricators with them). The problem, of course, is that there is a point above which a reputation cannot rise: once a writer has become the most important writer of the day, he or she has nowhere to go but down, or back to work . . . A thousand middle-aged professors of creative writing had suddenly become Immensely Important rivals of Shakespeare, and the decks rang with cries of praise as the passengers fought over the last little tittle of hyperbole, the critical adjective that might lift its recipient-and, not so incidentally, its donor-an inch above the teeming professorial masses, if only for a heady moment or two” [Bryan F. Griffin, Panic Among the Philistines (Chicago, Regnery Gateway, 1983), p. 51-52.]