From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, … - Randall Jarrell

Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.

Individualism, isolation, alienation. The poet is not only different from society, he is as different as possible from other poets; all this differentness is exploited to the limit — is used as subject matter, even. Each poet develops an elaborate, “personalized”, bureaucratized machinery of effect; refine your singularities is everybody’s maxim.

...man is the animal that moralizes. Man is also the animal that complains about being one, and says that there is an animal, a beast inside him — that he is brother to dragons. (He is certainly a brother to wolves, and to pandas too, but he is father to dragons, not brother: they, like many gods and devils, are inventions of his.)