March 5, 2006

from Lu Xun, "Notes After Reading," in Selected Works, vol. 4, pp. 100-1.

"Most writers hate critics for their carping tongues.

I remember a poet once said: A poet must write poems just as a plant must blossom -- it has no alternative. If you pluck it, eat it and find it poisonous, you have only youself to blame.

This is a beatuiful simile and sounds fair enough on the face of it. But if you think a little, it is wrong. It is wrong because a poet is not a plant but a man living in society; and collections of poems are sold -- you cannot just pick them up. Once a thing is sold it is a commodity, and whoever buys it has the right to praise or condemn it" (100).

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