I have models; models consciously chosen and forcibly incorporated into my literature; models that represent, in my judgment, what is aesthetically best in all genres. But a model is, if anything, an inspiration, an influence for a different creation. I cannot even imagine the feeling of someone like Baudelaire, who found his own aesthetic theory described by Poe. How is it possible? Perhaps it is, here as in everything else, a matter of feeling some belonging, of being or not being able to experience a full identification—a matter, in short, psychological-existential.
Models and Identification
