I Am in Exile
He never was a poet of God’s making; The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull, With this prophetic blessing – Be thou Dull; Drink, Swear, and roar, Forbear no lewd delight Fit far thy bulk, do anything but write. — John Dryden From Plato’s imagined Republic, not a single poet could truly be banished. Even today, with his thinning bag of tricks and a few lingering vagabond extravagances, he appears, undeterred. The city’s thousand blind Dhritarashtras search for him, wishing to seize him once as a “friend”—only then to shatter him to pieces. And the poet? He hides himself in the shadows, presenting to society a decoy, a counterfeit self: a cold, lifeless, iron effigy of the poet. For self-preservation he remains beyond the grasp of blind hands—or, exploiting their blindness, extends toward them only his iron duplicate. Is this why, in resistance, the poets of the world today have all withdrawn, half-fox and half-ascetic? My intent had been to write about the poet...