How Literary Fame Happens

But I think fame is having a base talent, then lucky and chance.

I don't think there's a reasonable explanation. While it's not totally chaotic, I think a lot of it is just politics and reputation. After all, there are plenty of names in programming, mathematics, physics, and even journalism, that come to mind, and I would certainly buy their books before others to see what all of the hype is about. Very rarely do I find myself taking chances with 'unproven texts' that haven't been 'accepted' at-large to learn from.

What I took away was that becoming immortal in text, in the minds of following generations, is every literary scholar's, or scholars', dream in general. We all want to matter. We don't want to be caught up in useless things, unless being immortal doesn't matter to you.

It kinda did in here.

As the "wider public for the most part lost interest in long poems during the Victorian period," she writes, and inclusion in a prestigious Victorian poetry anthology became crucial for continued prominence, Southey and Crabbe lost ground, and those whose corpus included shorter lyric poems gained. "Suitability for children" also mattered as the teaching of poetry became key for sustaining reputations, as did "susceptibility to pictorial illustration" in an era when publishers sought to improve poetry’s market share through visuals.

This example tells how fame was achieved in victorian period, so writers who wrote short poems which are also suitable for children at the same time worked. She didn't mention any explicit works which rose to fame because of that. I guess we have to read the book to find out.

Agreed. Is it a reasonable historical survey of some famous writers? Sure.

Is it relevant to today? Maybe 5% relevant, if talking about how tastes and consumption habits change...because talking about 'literary fame' in this day and age, to me, is rather laughable. The culture of reading long-form pieces is in sharp decline.

...and one of the biggest monkey wrenches to address in 'literary fame' is the Twilight / 50 Shades of Grey notion of using public domain conceits, poor writing, and wish fulfillment (Twilight) to reach a particular type of audience, one that will embrace and make a derivative of that with even inferior literary qualities (50 Shades) and achieve fame.