So, dear reader, allow me to rant a while. Outside the sun shines, the sky is blue, and snow gleams with a blinding brilliance. Since it's a delightful day, I would rather walk about and take the air, then read for a long time. Instead, I must vent my complaint upon the world.
I have had my fill of sentimentality, my fill of cant. The world does not labor under the weight of an excess of reason. Our autumnal polity does not stand desiccated by a mass of people devoted to the goods of intellect alone. We are on the contrary besotted with ourselves, with our feelings; feelings, mind you, with no moorings, no moral consequences. We are a gaggle insanely craving self-expression, yet we lack any sense of agency. So we drift with the currents of opinion, seeking to associate our vacuous selves with anyone and anything that draws approval from those whom we would please and cajole. We don't do anything, but if we can support the right causes, praise the right people, then we too will, by sheer force of association, come to seem virtuous.
We will know this because then we, too, will be praised as if by proxy. This is devoutly to be wished, for here and now it is better to seem than to be. So we pretend that any of us might become a poet, an artist, or otherwise be creative, without discipline, without risk, without any danger at all to our fond self-image.
I have had enough of this. I will no longer hesitate to take apart a friend's 'poem'; no longer will I suffer foolish sentiment, casual cliché, and emotive bombast to go by without censure. My scorn and my anger will wash over them all, and those with moral intelligence, a sense of reason and proportion, those who know true, deep feeling, as opposed to momentary passion or manufactured sentiment, they will likely stick around. The rest, well, they can go to their reward.
With that, my friends, I must beg your indulgence, that I might descant upon my own art.
I am a poet. I know this not because I 'feel creative' or because I seek to 'express myself,' but simply because I make poems. I work in a discipline that weaves its works across thousands of years. You will find poets in every civilization, poets devoted to a demanding discipline, working within - and sometimes breaking apart - forms that require skill, daring, invention, and knowledge. Unless you have submitted to the discipline, can name your masters, and would put the made thing ahead of your self, you have no business calling yourself a poet, for being a poet is not a matter of publishing, fame, or self-assertion. It is, at the last, a matter of love, and as always, love is labor over time. That is why an artist is devoted to the good of the thing to be made, first, last, and always.
So, if you want to scrawl a few words in order to exorcise some feeling or another, feel free to do so, but do not call it a poem. If you wish to burden the world with your opinion, there is nothing anyone can do to stop you, but know this, an opinion is worthless. Only knowledge growing into wisdom is worth a damn in this or any other world. Spare me therefore the shoddy, sentimental, half-assed opinions you have borrowed without risk or effort from the latest marketing campaign. Time is short, you see, so you're really better off taking a walk or reading a good book.
With that, it's time for me to do both.
Peace out.
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