By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan... In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.
Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.
Men whose sense of taste is destroyed by sickness, sometimes think honey sour. A diseased eye does not see many things which do exist, and notes many things which do not exist. The same thing frequently takes place with regard to the force of words, when the critic is inferior to the writer.
The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.
It's society that disables an individual by not investing in enough creativity to allow for someone to show us the quality that makes them rare and valuable and capable.
Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind.
Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.
The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.