HTRAP Part 1 Chapter 5 discussion

In a writing sample about Bright Star/"Ode to a Grecian Urn," I talked about how I think that writers must be inspired by their experiences, following the saying, "write what you know." However, in HTRAP 5 Eagleton says, "whether authors of fiction really did experience an emotion they write about is not the point." I understand this to some extent, like the example of Shakespeare not having to have felt "sexual jealousy" in order to write Othello, but at the same time I think that is a somewhat lackluster example. It is more likely than not that Shakespeare did, at some point, feel sexual jealousy, and while this may not have inspired Othello, it is a feeling that he possibly could have drawn from to better shape his characters. Authors have to fully understand a feeling in order to be able to flesh out that feelings when creating their characters.  Also, because writing is such a solo job, authors have to be continually self-reflecting and allowing that to, in some way, shape their writing. Eagleton does, however, make the point that we cannot assume that a writer's only influence is their personal experiences, and that there is no way to actually tell if their own lives are having an affect on the content of their work. This seems to make sense. Also, in this section he is talking about fiction writers, and I wonder if poetry is considered fiction or not; I can't recall there ever being a distinction with poetry, and I often find myself asking whether or not I think the protagonist of a poem is the author himself. Eagleton also states that poems "can be the occasion for emotion," but that "literary feelings are responses to poems." This seems like a very important distinction; while a poem can make you feel something, that is purely a response, and that response can differ based on the person. The idea that poems are interpreted in various ways is discussed on the first page of this chapter.