"Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others"
About this Quote
A bonfire disguised as criticism: Artaud isn’t merely dunking on poetry, he’s attacking the museum culture that turns art into a reliquary. “Worth reading once” is a dare to the reader and a threat to the institution. If a poem can’t scorch you on contact, why keep it around like a pressed flower? The line tries to reframe literature as an event, not an heirloom; a violent present tense rather than a portable past.
The provocation lands because it flips the pieties of “canon” and “legacy” into something almost parasitic. “Dead poets” aren’t honored here; they’re accused of taking up oxygen. Artaud’s subtext is aimed at the gatekeepers who use dead geniuses as a barricade against new work, new bodies, new forms. Destroying the poem after a single reading is symbolic arson: an attempt to prevent art from being domesticated into credentialed taste. It’s also a reminder that what’s preserved tends to be what’s already been approved.
Context sharpens the knife. Artaud, the dramatist of the Theatre of Cruelty, wanted performance to hit like a seizure: immediate, bodily, hard to translate into polite interpretation. Written poetry, fixed and repeatable, becomes the wrong medium for his hunger. The irony is that Artaud survives precisely as text, canonized against his own wishes. The quote functions less as a policy proposal than as an aesthetic threat: stop treating art like property, start treating it like contagion.
The provocation lands because it flips the pieties of “canon” and “legacy” into something almost parasitic. “Dead poets” aren’t honored here; they’re accused of taking up oxygen. Artaud’s subtext is aimed at the gatekeepers who use dead geniuses as a barricade against new work, new bodies, new forms. Destroying the poem after a single reading is symbolic arson: an attempt to prevent art from being domesticated into credentialed taste. It’s also a reminder that what’s preserved tends to be what’s already been approved.
Context sharpens the knife. Artaud, the dramatist of the Theatre of Cruelty, wanted performance to hit like a seizure: immediate, bodily, hard to translate into polite interpretation. Written poetry, fixed and repeatable, becomes the wrong medium for his hunger. The irony is that Artaud survives precisely as text, canonized against his own wishes. The quote functions less as a policy proposal than as an aesthetic threat: stop treating art like property, start treating it like contagion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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