Just when I thought that Garcia Lorca could be really interesting, reading the introduction to his Collected Poems and doing some study on his poems revealed how fucking pretentious some poets are.

"Who is that laughing? Who are you? I despise you all, I rise above all your paltry thoughs. I am greater than you...Your hearts are full of indifference and your brains are taken up by mean and miserable things [while I] am made of impossible love...In life, the great problem is spiritual isolation, for men are so cruel that they love to embitter the lives of the few people who think and feel...There are many who scoff at love and at art, and these are the ones who achieve happiness on earth. Those who have a fiery heart and love truly...those are the ones who reap only sorrow and the unhappiness of the other life. I am one of them. And I will lean on the shepherd's staff of art, and will advance until my eyes open to the truth." {"Estado sentimental: La primavera")

Seriously, how much more condescending can you get?

Why do people think that literature is so inaccessible? And why do university students and their tutors themselves think that good poetry needs to be overly pretentious and lofty, it's just so bloody obnoxious and airy fairy at the same time. I mean, really. Why the hell would you try to put across something as simple as a state of melancholy with a bizarre series of images, padded liberally with some waffling about?

It seems that I'm fighting a neverending battle for low art against the proponents of high art. My favourite authors (Shakespeare, Wilde, Dickens) were all massively popular in their time. And why? (Discussions of class differences aside) They wrote for their audiences. And although Wilde thought himself highbrow and was constantly in the pursuit of the beautiful in everything, at least he knew he was being highbrow and his many epigrams made us laugh not only at other people, but at ourselves.

Why the need for bombast? Why the need to feel superior to everyone else in your pursuit of the fucking artistic ideal? It's all so childish, really.

"I'm better than you are."

"No, I'm better than you are."

"No, I am."

"No, I AM!"

"I am always on the lookout to further myself for the artistic good of society at large!"

"I was a repressed homosexual and worked out my feelings through obscure poetry!"

"I use more four syllable words than you!"

"I quote Cicero, e. e. cummings, Saussure and Beckett. All in the same line."

*buzzer sounds*

Both of you have been voted off the island. Now piss off and let me listen to my Backstreet Boys CD.