This is the artist, then, life’s hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty’s miser, glory’s slave.

Wolfe’s line compresses a whole romantic-ironical theory of the artist into a chain of metaphors. The artist is figured as insatiable (“life’s hungry man,” “glutton of eternity”), driven to consume experience and time itself in order to transmute it into art. Yet that appetite is paired with hoarding and servitude: the artist is also “beauty’s miser,” accumulating aesthetic value, and “glory’s slave,” bound to the need for recognition. The effect is both admiring and critical—artistic creation appears as compulsion as much as vocation, a life organized around desire that can never be fully satisfied.