Bottomline: February 11

To pen a few rhetorical lines that have rhyme and rhythm will be the unbridled urge of young writers.

One such budding poet met the poetry editor of an avant-garde quarterly magazine for submitting his work. The editor, after a cursory perusal, like a senescent accountant checking the column of figures from top to bottom, asked the nervous poet, “Did you write the poem yourself?” When the young man nodded proudly in the affirmative, the poetry editor stood up and shook hands with pseudo-excitement, and exclaimed, “I’m glad to meet you, Edgar Allan Poe. I thought you were dead long ago.”

Alexander Pope said:

Sir, I admit your general rule,

That every poet is a fool.

But you yourself may serve to show it,

That every fool is not a poet.

– J.S. Raghavan in Deccan Herald