Herman Melville | part of our Anglo Saxon superstitions |
This absolute and unconditional adoration of Shakespeare has grown to be a part of our Anglo Saxon superstitions... You must believe in Shakespeare's unapproachability, or quit the country. But what sort of belief is this for an American, a man who is bound to carry republican progressiveness into Literature, as well as into Life? Believe me, my friends, that men not very much inferior to Shakespeare, are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio. And the day will come, when you shall say who reads a book by an Englishman that is a modern?
—Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” The Literary World, 1850
Library of Congress