Bill Knott:

*
When poets start to break under the torrent of hatred society pours upon them; when they begin to internalize that hatred and to self-generate it in the neurotic hope of propitiating its cruelties, when they snatch the whip from Master and lash themselves;

when they understand how loathed and despised poetry is by all the powers of this world; when they realize how loathed and despised they are by all the authorities of this world; and when, under the endless onslaught of contempt and scorn and persecution which they as poets are condemned to suffer, at last they too loathe and despise themselves,

that is the point they turn on each other and kill each other.

*
All societies exist for one purpose: to murder poets.

Everything in the world exists in order to end up on the point of a knife entering the poet's throat.

**




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