First, a word about the traditional feud between poets and fiction writers. I wish to acknowledge, up front, that that feud does not exist. Not traditionally. Conditions in the wild are very unfavorable to it. To witness episodes of this feud, you have to visit a special kind of mismanaged zoo called an M.F.A. program.

Perhaps I needn’t add that it is not my object to prosecute any such feud here. Let me be explicit: I revere the great novelists as much as I revere the great poets. I do not see poetry as the higher form of writing. I do not think poets are better people. If anything, I’m sick to death of poets and poetry in a way I could never be sick of fiction and fiction writers. Poets are my family—with all the opprobrium that implies. Whereas, fiction writers strike me as delightfully removed from any familiar mode of being. They have houses and lifestyles. And they traffic in plots, an inherently good idea.

Still, I do “have somewhat against thee,” fiction writers. There are certain abuses, rare enough in poetry, that are commonplace in works of fiction. A person who reads and writes poetry all the time will perhaps see these abuses more clearly than the practitioner of fiction, who is naturally and understandably accustomed to them.

Take a moment to reflect on the memorable metaphor that Niccolò Machiavelli deploys on the dedication page (as it were) of Il principe. He says there that a painter, in order to paint the lowlands, must of course go up into the mountains, and in order to paint a mountain, must head to the valley. Analogously, in order to really understand the nature of common citizenship, one must be a prince, and in order to know the real deal regarding princes, one must be an ordinary person like Machiavelli himself. That’s why it’s okay for him to tell you how to rule your kingdom, O Prince. And perhaps it is the same, I am suggesting, with fiction writers and poets.

The theory’s a good one. Think of the many times nonpoets have laid down memorable and all-but-devastating criticisms of poetry. Think of the recently dead V. S. Naipaul on poetry: