Know your faults and keep your wits

Horace's Ars Poetica should be required reading for all would-be writers. I particularly like the last section:

AP:438-476 Know your faults and keep your wits

If you ever read Quintilius anything, he’d say:

‘Oh do change this, and this.’ If, after two or three

Vain attempts, you could do no better, he’d order

Deletion: ‘return the ill-made verse to the anvil’.

If you chose to defend your fault rather than change it,

He’d spend not another word or useless effort

To stop you loving you, and yours, unrivalled, alone.

An honest, sensible man will condemn lifeless verse,

Fault the harsh, smear the inelegant with a black

Stroke of the pen, cut out pretentious adornment,

Force you to elucidate where it’s not clear enough,

Denounce the ambiguous phrase, mark amendments,

Be an Aristarchus: not say: ‘Why should I offend

A friend for a trifle?’ Such trifles lead to serious

Trouble, once he’s been laughed at, or badly received.

The sensible fear to touch, they flee, a crazy poet,

As when the evil itch, or jaundice, plagues someone,

Or fanatical delusions, or plain lunacy,

Diana’s curse: children rashly follow and tease him.

He, inspired, goes wandering off, spouting his verses,

And if like a fowler intent on blackbirds, he falls

Into a well, or a pit, however much he cries:

‘Help me, citizens!’ none will bother to pull him out.

If anyone did choose to help, and let down a rope,  

I’d say: ‘Who knows if he didn’t do that on purpose,

And doesn’t want to be saved?’ and I’ll tell the tale

Of the Sicilian poet’s death, how Empedocles

Keen to be an immortal god, coolly leapt into

Burning Etna. Grant poets the power and right to kill

Themselves: who saves one, against his will, murders him.

It’s not his first time, nor, if he’s rescued will he

Become human now, and stop craving fame in death.

It’s not too clear why he keeps on making verses.

Has he desecrated ancestral ashes, disturbed

A sad spot struck by lightning, sacrilegiously? Yes,

He’s mad: like a bear, that’s broken the bars of its cage

The pest puts all to flight, learned or not, with reciting:

Whom he takes tight hold of, he grips, and reads to death,

A leech that never looses the skin, till gorged with blood.