'Once Read, Always Known'

“He is almost as important to me as Shakespeare, and I think of him almost as the second most important writer in English, absurd as that might sound.” I am always surprised and gratified when someone expresses a conviction I thought was mine alone, as though my privacy had been wire-tapped with my approval. Literature is a public art, only fulfilled when writer and reader collaborate, yet our understanding of books, the way we claim some as our own and cherish them, is utterly subjective. Their status in our lives is a private preserve beyond mere opinion, fashion and criticism. Henry Oliver is writing, of course, about Samuel Johnson. What other writer in English might be fitted into his formulation? For some, Keats or Dickens, I suppose. Perhaps Swift or Austen. Let it go at this: such devotion and identification is always rare. It’s more than “liking” a writer or being a “fan.” Oliver writes: “As with the greatest poets, there are lines of Johnson’s that I have never forgotten,…