everything contemporary

If he doesn’t put down the contemporary thing, he isn’t a great writer, for he has to live in the past. That is what I mean by “everything is contemporary.” The minor poets of the period, or the precious poets of the period, are all people who are under the shadow of the past. A man who is making a revolution has to be contemporary. A minor person can live in the imagination.

—Gertrude Stein, How Writing Is Written: Volume II of the Uncollected Writing of Gertrude Stein (Black Sparrow Press, 1974), edited by Robert Bartlett Haas

ahead of its time

And poetry, which is generally ahead of its time, may go so far ahead as to seem behind in time.

—Eugenio Montale, Poet In Our Time (Marion Boyars, 1979)

permanently contemporary

Poets worth reading usually believe things the age they live in no longer does. Poets are always anachronistic, obsolete, unfashionable, and permanently contemporary.

—Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (Ausable Press, 2008)

upstart crow

Nor must we forget, that, in his own life-time, Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, but only Master William Shakespeare of the shrewd, thriving business firm of Condell, Shakespeare & Co., proprietors of the Globe Theater in London; and by a courtly author, of the name of Chettle, was hooted at, as an "upstart crow" beautfied "with other birds' feathers."

—Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," The Literary World, August 17 and 24, 1850