Once, the poet knew how to account for his poetry (‘To op...

Once, the poet knew how to account for his poetry (‘To open it through prose’, as Dante puts it), and the critic was also a poet. Now, the critic has lost access to the work of creation and thus gets revenge by presuming to judge it, while the poet no longer knows how to save his own work and thus discounts this incapacity by blindly consigning himself to the frivolity of an angel. 

Agamben, Nudities