I decided

 I decided that I would be a top scholar in my field. With an improbable and breathtakingly arrogant level of confidence, I simply figured out what it would take, and did it. 

I owe some of this to Debicki. He was clearly a top scholar in my field, but it was also clear that his work was not very good, so I thought that I could be better than that, simply because I was already at a superior intellectual level. He would tell me, for example, that I had expertise in philosophy that he didn't have. I took two philosophy courses as a freshman in college; that is my entire expertise in philosophy, aside from reading a little Wittgenstein on the side and struggling to understand Derrida, like everyone else of my generation. It is true that I understood Locke, Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant at a decent level, just from one course.  

What I did was to read the poetry. I went to the library and checked out books of poetry by all the Spanish poets, and read them. I found the shelf where the general books of criticism were; you have to read 20 books (now it would be 50), in order to know what the field was. My strong points were that I knew literary theory, and didn't just "apply" it. I knew the primary texts and the main secondary ones in my field. I made a list of the journals I wanted to publish in. I hit some mid level ones, like Symposium and Hispania, and some high level ones, like Hispanic Review, MLN, and PMLA, after several tries. I memorized a lot of poems. 

I discovered that there were several styles of criticism in Spain. What I called "altamente poético" talked a lot about "primor lírico" [lyrical beauty] and was mostly just fluff. Then there was a style I called "planteamiento de la cuestión." This style consisted of spending a lot of effort at the beginning by just defining what was to be done, and all the necessary preliminary steps needed to accomplish the task--which never really had a payout at the end. Another style was documenting everything, but not interpreting it. Another style was imitating the poet's own explanations of their own work. What was rare was criticism that was actually literary criticism. Even a good undergraduate education in an English department should prepare you to read a poem and analyze it. Debicki would praise things for being "analytical," which meant the critic was looking at the text itself. It was telling that that was a term of praise, rather than a basic expectation. His own students produced work that was not at a consistently high level, although some were half-way decent. It was clear they didn't have my "philosophy" since they would often just quote the same theoretical texts that Debicki would give them in his seminar.  

I had the kind of brain that was fascinated by prosody. I remember loving scanning French alexandrines in high school, figuring out the silent e. I was taking apart poems when I was 15, figuring out how they worked, just like other kids used to do with mechanical alarm clocks and the like. I naively thought you had to be able to do that to be a poet.  I did the same with critical essays, figuring out the mechanics of that, how to do that myself. 

So deciding to be a top scholar in a tiny field is kind of a naive thing to do, in retrospect. Only someone without much experience would actually think it was possible to do this through sheer decision-making. If I had known that this was a difficult thing to do, it wouldn't have been as easy as it was for me.