#Realconversation
My classmate: I'm wondering if the past authors would know that their works might become "literature" taught at schools one day.
Professor: I read too much William Blake to answer this question.
@aglarienenglit I’m also curious to know that, so how did you answer after reading works of William Blake?
@color_fool Most of the authors simply don't care. I mean, they would be happy if they could make a living by writing(Blake could not though), but they generally wouldn't go as far to assume that readers would still be interested in their works 100 years later, and even if future readers would, the authors themselves wouldn't live that long to benefit anything from their fames. Besides, a large proportion of the "pop literature" of one generation usually won't make the textbooks 100 years later. Some poets in the 19th century were very well-known and sold well in their lives, but nowadays even the literature students at the unis won't spend any time looking at their works. The literary "canon" itself shifts from time to time.
