Why do so many poets apologize before reading their work aloud? I wondered. How many readings had we attended at St. Tancred’s parish hall where the poet felt obliged to kill his own young before they ever drew breath? “Get on with it!” you always wanted to shout—but you never did. Poets—other than the dreaded Millbank Morrison, of course, who had a hide as thick as a rhinoceros’s in chain mail—were notoriously sensitive about their creations, whereas scientists never were. Did Joseph Priestley apologize for discovering oxygen? Or Henry Cavendish for hydrogen? Of course not! They fairly crowed
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