Poetry Magazine Comes Out Against Poets

Javier Huerta:

Poets give the mind a motion too changeable and bewitching, to consist with right practice. We must avoid their specious tropes and figures and the vicious abundance of phrase, this trick of metaphors, this volubility of tongue, which makes so great a noise in the world. I saw the soul of Hesiod bound fast to a brazen pillar and gibbering, and the soul of Homer hung on a tree with serpents writhing about it, this being their punishment for what they had said about the gods. For they deserved to be chased out of the lists and beaten with rods. No one can interrogate poets about what they say. The dialectic cannot engage them. Most often when they are introduced into the discussion some say that the poet’s meaning is one thing and some another, for the topic is one on which nobody can produce a conclusive argument. The wit of the fables and religions of the ancient world is well nigh consumed: they have already served the poets long enough; and it is now high time to dismiss them; especially seeing they have this peculiar imperfection, that they were only fictions at first. Poets are liars.