James Joyce: [not word by word but letter by letter]

[...]
Their Eminences of the Holy College are hardly more scrupulous solitaries during the ballot for Christ’s vicar than was Stephen at this time. He wrote a great deal of verse and, in default of any better contrivance, his verse allowed him to combine the offices of penitent and confessor. He sought in his verses to fix the most elusive of his moods and he put his lines together not word by word but letter by letter. He read Blake and Rimbaud on the values of letters and even permuted and combined the five vowels to construct cries for primitive emotions. To none of his former fervours had he given himself with such a whole heart as to this fervour; « the monk now seemed to him no more than half the artist. He persuaded himself that it is necessary for an artist to labour incessantly at his art if he wishes to express completely even the simplest conception and he believed that every moment of inspiration must be paid for m advance. He was not convinced of the truth of the saying [Poeta nascitur, non fit] "The poet is born, not made” but he was quite sure » of the truth of this at least: [Poema fit, non nascitur] "The poem is made not born". The burgher notion of the poet Byron m undress pouring out verses [like] just as a city fountain pours out water seemed to him characteristic of most popular judgments on esthetic matters and he combated the notion at its root « by saying solemnly to Maurice — Isolation is the first principle of artistic economy. »

Stephen did not attach himself to art in any spirit of youthful dilettantism but strove to pierce to the significant heart of everything. « He doubled backwards into the past of humanity and caught glimpses of emergent art as one might have a vision of the pleisiosauros emerging from his ocean of slime. He seemed almost to hear the simple cries of fear and joy and wonder which are antecedent to all song, the savage rhythms of men pulling at the oar, » to see the rude scrawls and the portable gods of men whose legacy Leonardo and Michelangelo inherit. And over all this chaos of history and legend, of fact and supposition, he strove to draw out a line of order, to reduce the abysses of the past to order by a diagram.

[...]

STEPHEN HERO