My (metrical) Misogyny

Horace, in his strangely Aristotelian (yet not) letter to the Pisoes on the art of poetry, wraps things up by saying that poets are basically nuts. He weaves a yarn of a fictitious poet who wants to throw himself into a well all the while wondering, "should I intervene? Should I deprive him of a remarkable death?" The question just hangs there as he immediately shifts to the apocryphal story of how the Sicilian poet Empedocles threw himself into an erupting volcano. The moral of this lengthy diatribe?

quem vero arripuit, tenet occiditque legendo,
non missura cutem nisi plena cruoris hirudo.

whom he (the poet) grabs, he holds and drags down with reading,
a leech that, if not filled with blood, won't let go.

A current in lyric poetry that always seems to go blissfully unnoticed is the violence poets attend to their own writing. Let's not forget, Horace himself is a poet, so what does it mean that his final say on his own profession is that poetry turns you into a kind of parasitically cruel lunatic? And he's not the only one. I'm reminded of Brecht's poem on the muses where he envisions them as chorus girls who basically become sexually aroused (well, it's a pun actually, as Scham in German can mean both "shame" and "vagina") as they are beaten into shape by the director. Even Verlaine in his "Art poetique":

Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui son cou!

Grab Eloquence and snap his neck!

Horace, who, as far as I know, has written the longest explication of how poets go crazy, never actually gets into why they lose their marbles. Why is this lunacy projected back onto their art as extreme violence? This is not a matter of little concern for me; just this morning I found myself perfectly satisfied with having written

to beat it out with verse the punching bag
unable to complain about the bruises,
to ignore Muses more concerned with weight
loss than flesh far too desiccant to weep.

I think he provides a clue in the form of that little gerund at the end of the penultimate line: legendo. The poet doesn't drag his reader down by writing but by reading. The poet is so obsessed with his own interiority, with his own poetic vision, he becomes entirely paranoid of what a reader might do. He latches on, sucks him dry, beats him to a pulp, desperately hoping to enslave his perceptions. To no avail. The poet is almost justified in his madness, because lyric readers are generally the ones to rub against the grain, to say back to the poet, whose morbid immortality has been assured by the fact of being read over and over, "no, that's not what you meant. This is what you mean, and there's nothing you can say or do about it."