The view of the artist and of the genesis of literary works which has become a method for Wilson in The Wound and the Bow is stated [in his novel, I Thought of Daisy (1929)] in terms of personal experience….

The Wound and the Bow rests upon the thesis that the artist is strong and weak at the same time; his great virtue as an artist inseparable from his weakness; his weakness perhaps (Wilson is not too clear on this point) the cause or one of the causes of his strength; or, to use Wilson's sentence, the artist is "the victim of a malodorous disease which renders him abhorrent to society and periodically degrades him and makes him helpless; but is also the master of a superhuman art which everybody has to respect and which the normal man finds he needs."

Just this conception of the artist upsets the...