``Much the most important thing that happened to me at Campbell [his prep school] was that I there read Sohrab and Rustem .... I loved the poem at first sight and have loved it ever since. As the wet fog, in the first line, rose out of the Oxus stream, so out of the whole poem there rose and wrapped me round an exquisite silvery coolness, a delightful quality of distance and calm, a grave melancholy. I hardly appreciated then, as I have since learned to, the central tragedy; what enchanted me was the artist in Pekin with his ivory forehead and pale hands, the cypress in the Queen's garden, the backward glance at Rustem's youth, the pedlars from Khabul, the hushed Chorasmian waste. Arnold gave me at once [...] a sense, not indeed of passionless vision, but of a passionate, silent gazing at things a long way off. And here observe how literature actually works. Parrot critics say that Sohrab is a poem for classicists to be enjoyed only by those who recognise the Homeric echoes. But I ... knew nothing of Homer. For me the relation worked the other way; when I came, years later, to read the Iliad I liked it partly because it was reminiscent of Sohrab. Plainly it does not matter at what point you first break into the system of European poetry. Only keep your ears open and your mouth shut and everything will lead you to everything else in the end.''

He may have been a pain, but he was a scholar. (We even see a little bit of humility in the quoted text...not much, God knows, but some)

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