Excerpt from The Art and Craft of Letters: Satire There is always, beyond the poetic impulse and its expression, the desire to realise poetry in life, to bring experience up to the topmost level of imagination. It is a crying for the moon perhaps the argument from history and experience mocks it, but there are just enough moments in life to justify it and set aspiration leaping in the hearts of those men to whom art is the sword of freedom enough moments only to confirm the fierce desire and to plunge into despair at the small satisfaction it is ever granted. Then do they swing the sword in their hands and sharpen its edge to slay those men, and the follies and abuses that seem to them to stand in their way. They cast about to discover the enemies m art, all those for whom the shining symbol has no meaning, and the world is joyless and dull or a source of profit only, and they set about to destroy them, to strip them of their complacency and the dead ideas in which they have clothed themselves. So Heine, in a letter prophesying songs of liberty after the revolution of 1830, suddenly realising, as poets out of luck do, the probable deafness of men, cried: And thou. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.