Poets have accumulated many labels throughout history. Some are not so flattering—Plato saw them as liars and demanded their exile from his precious utopia. Others glimpse, in the role of the poet, something closer to the sacred: Emerson called them “liberating gods,” while Stevens cast them as “priests of the invisible.” Some view poets as playing important, functional roles in society—Shelley famously championed them as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” while Lorca branded them “revolutionaries,” and Brodsky enshrined them as “custodians of language.” Yet others see the poet in a realm neither human nor exactly divine—they’re “bees” in Rilke, “antennae” according to Pound, and “dead” according to the think pieces that appear regularly in today’s newspapers and magazines.
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