There will come a day when no more poets will be born. The city, in our fearsome urbanized future, will impede their birth. And so, the government will keep the ones still made ill ‘by beauty and by the past’ in gardens, like greenhouses, on the rooftops of skyscrapers, without demanding anything of them — much the way we now provide for the insane — leaving these geniuses free in their cages believing the lie that they might yet prettify the landscape of the apocalypse with their brilliance.
“Allowed to cast themselves for great tragic roles, they were experiencing the exhilaration felt by great tragic actors. It was not lack of control, lack of taste, lack of knowledge that accounted for permission of what was not permitted in the West. Rather was it the reverse. Our people could not have handled patients full of the dangerous thoughts of death and love; these people had such resources that they did not need to empty their patients of such freight.”
Rebecca West | Black Lamb and Grey Falcon