No this isn’t going to be an article about Shakespeare but an article about the benefits or not, as the case may be, of gaining backlinks.
The following information is my personal opinion gained from building websites, other SEO professionals may disagree.
I have found that the process of building masses of backlinks is a wasted one. My time is far better spent creating fresh unique content, if enough valid content is created then the search engines will find your website regardless of how many backlinks you have artificially gained. Plus when a website has a large amount of good content, other websites and blogs will want to link to you anyway.
The process of creating masses of artificial backlinks is a form of manipulating the search engines and most search engines disallow this is their terms of service. Why take the risk of being blocked from all the search engines.
As I said, in my opinion, the best way to build a successful site is to just create stacks of great content, initially a couple of links will be more than enough to get your new site indexed.