does the scholar possess the poet, or the poet possess the scholar?

"And you? Why do you work on Ash?"

"My mother liked him. She read English. I grew up on his idea of Sir Walter Ralegh, and his Agincourt poem and Offa on the Dyke. And then Ragnarok." He hesitated. "They were what stayed alive, when I'd been taught and examined everything else.

"Maud smiled then. "Exactly. That's it. What could survive our education."

Possession, by A. S. Byatt