To know anything of a poet but his poetry is so far as the poetry is concerned to know something that may be entertaining even delightful but is certainly inessential.
Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.
Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.
I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and honestly I may as well just start it again now because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.