What makes a piece of literature a classic, and what's your favourite please?

in #writing5 years ago

View the original post on Musing.io

I love this question so much I don't even know where to start answering it. First of all I think I should start by addressing the russian and Persian aspect.

First of all I love Rumi. I love him as a person, a mystic and I love his poetry. I think it's absolutely mind liberating and he's definitely my kind of poet-- in that I love to read mystical poems and Rumi is probably the foremost mystical poet you can never come across.

Now here I will continue by saying that you are actually pretty wrong in assuming that Rumi's poetry is not appreciated ir acclaimed. Of course he might not be as idolized as Shakespeare is--and there are some rather good and understandable reasons for that, which I'll get to later--but this doesn't mean by a long short that he isn't a special and highly recognized poet in his own right.

Hell he's one of the most recognized Persian poet in the western world. Or one of the most recognized foreign mystical poet of all time in fact. Period.

You can see that I keep refering to him foremost as a mystical poet. Just as meister Eckart was a mystic too. Just as Lao Tzu was and etc. And the tricky thing about writing such esoteric form of literature is that you can't obviously expect to be read as widely as such authors as the Nrontes and Jane Austen and Shakespeare.

(And then again Shakespeare's "bardolatory" is another ENTIRELY different topic of its own.)

People want to read romance and tragedy and takes if provincial lives. Not many people want to read about the spirit and penitence and liberation, consequently not much text is written about them.

Living literary fame is mostly predicated on two things. How widely you're read and how critically acclaimed you are. Obviously like I said Shakespeare and the Austins and Charles Dickens were born and lived and wrote in western communities, and let's not deceive ourselves, most of the literary tastes of the period was dicatated by that community; TO the audience of that community. And of course I don't see anything wrong with that.

Just like I don't see anything wrong with the fact that over the course of time the dictations of that same area came to be accepted everywhere as a standard. Whatever the reasons are, it happened and it is the way it is. And again Rumi's poetry was even well received by them. It just might not have resonated with the class in great demand to escape from their lives and get engrossed in some fictional world where they could escape the rigors of their lives--which was worth Shakespeare et al offered, while Rumi offered the opposite.

But regardless of all this, for a mystic poet, Jalal Adin Rumi sure did and does have his fair share of following--even in the western world. Hell I, an African who's never left the continent, am also an ardent reader of Rumi.

Now in the case of the Russians, I can say again that that's another entirely wrong assumption. There are only a few writer--that can be counted on one hand--whose critical acclaim compare to those enjoyed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekov, Vladmir Nabokov et al.

Hell even Boris Pasternak is critically acclaimed and relatively well read (he has a novel prize and he's awesome as hell.)

Now again as I said earlier, what makes living literary fame is how widely read and how critically acclaimed you are while you live, but in the case of a posthumous literary fame--that is to answer the question what makes a book of literature a classic-- it depends solely not on how much books you sold or how acclaimed you were in your lfetime, but how much the new generation has embraced you.

Books transcend time. Which is why they say that writers are immortal. That is, writers whose books "survived". Not all books survive. We have A LOT of period pieces in literature- -books which only deals with topics restricted to the zeitgeist of their day and age.

And again there are books, a lot of them than one would think, thatbwete both critically and commercially a failure in their writer's lifetime but that went on to become a posthumous classic. The Great Gatsby is a good example. F. Scott Fitzgerald thought he died a failure.

So to become a classic a book must not only belong to the period in which it was written, its basic essence must transcend time itself. Writers such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Dickens and yes, Rumi and Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy all wrote such books. Which is why they're still being read today.

Honestly you can't tell me that you can mention five books written in the 20th century that is better than War and Peace, or Anna Karennina, or The Brothers Karamazov. You simply can't. And that is why they will always be a classic, because they are appealing not just as a historical recording, but as an analysis of the human heart--and they will forever endure as long as humans still have a heart.

As for my great classic--boy where do I even start!! Honestly I have no idea where to start. I mostly only read old stuffs and if I start to name them I'd begin from Aeschylus and Euripides and Aristophanes and Homer and probably won't stop until I get to Toni Morrison- -and you can obviously tell how exhausting that would be, going from some 6th century BC till now XD.

But if gun to my head I should choose just one book. It'll be Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolfe. Don't even ask me why. I bet the musing editor wouldn't be enough for that.

***

Also while reading your question clarification again I see you might not have been implying that Rumi and the Russians aren't critically acclaimed but the opposite. Either way, hope you enjoy this answer.

Cheers.

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