"you don't have to slash with the sword of truth..."

Do you know this quote? It finishes up, "You can point with it..." I forget where I read it but it went straight into my brain.

Update!

I know it's a ton of verbiage today. It's because my eyes stopped watering. But I'm going to the dentist in the morning, so I suspect they'll be watering again; at least dentists don't give you a fever, but I've had the toothache nearly as long as the cold (Nov 23rd and counting). I'm living on Nurofen.

Meanwhile, a librarian called Dave Lull, who lives on the shore of Lake Superior (I think; I looked him up), has sent me a rather superior link.

W. Martin, in the Boston Review, says this about Michael Hofmann's Poetry piece on Zbigniew Herbert (which I discussed earlier today):

"Even now, a generation after the imposition of martial law and almost four years after Poland’s accession to the European Union, readers, critics, and editors here remain riveted by a Romantic illusion reluctant to engage Polish poetry as art rather than as something to be venerated, and content to keep hooting the same praises sung during the Cold War at the same three or four poets, and for the same reasons. This helps explain the declaration by English translator and poet Michael Hofmann, in the May issue of Poetry, that Zbigniew Herbert is “as near to sacred to [him] as anything in or out of poetry is.” What’s troubling here is not that Hofmann voices what so many admirers of Herbert think anyway—that the poet’s works are like scripture and therefore untouchable—but that the consequences of his faith-based criticism are so damaging."

He continues; I won't quote any more. Phew! I knew there was something I was trying to say...