The poets of the early days graduated from simply recording history to make future generations miserable, to performing the delicate tactical forgetting surgeries that created legends, honorable acts, and heroes. These were the first true historians. Poets who had forgotten the original mission of spreading unhappiness about unhappiness, and had taken to phoning it in by merely recording genealogies in rhyme, generally failed to pivot to new careers as historians. They were marginalized, and have since gone on to become acutely sensitive observers of reality whom nobody listens to (a fact they
...more
