Is the function of the Poet
Mere Sound to Stuff the Ear?²
Poetics isn’t Picturesque Dilettantism
Or Egotistical expressionism for Craven
Motives – grasping for Sensation & Flattery³
Their Ignorance of the Arts is Notable, and they
Lose no opportunity to Proclaim it to each other⁴
You with your Hackneyed Conventions Usurp the
Supremacy in Art and consider Nothing Legitimate
But what you do yourselves – all else you Suppress⁵
In Contact with Social Conditions, the Poetry Loses
Its Practical Significance becomes Purely Literary⁶
He Profanes the Scene by the Mockery of his Art⁷
Better far pursue a Frivolous trade by Serious
Means – than a Sublime Art Frivolously⁸
Inquisitive Chatter & Cataloguing
Of things one’s spotted isn’t Art⁹
If you Write Books merely
To Entertain – Burn them¹⁰
¹ Henry Herbert Knibbs, Out There Somewhere
² Wallace Stevens, Academic Discourse at Havana
³ Allen Ginsberg, Meditation and Poetics
⁴ E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
⁵ Anton Chekhov tr. Constance Garnett, The Sea-Gull
⁶ Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
⁷ Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Prophetic Pictures
⁸ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
⁹ Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince
¹⁰ Miguel Ángel Asturias, The Latin American Novel