A Poet’s Syntax on Trial

"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language." (W. H. Auden) They sit in their glass-paneled chambers, these judges, tuning their ears to the hum of silicon— eyebrows raised at every metaphor too deft, too dressed, too drenched in sense. Who wrote this? they ask, tapping screens that blink like oracles but lie like mirrors. It is not enough now to love language. To kneel at her altar of nuance and nudge, to spend your years courting the comma or polishing an ellipsis like a saint’s bone. Critics will ask for proof of fingerprints, demand your syntax be sworn in blood or misspelled, at least, with mortal joy. Once, we wrote for the ear of the gods, now we write under the eye of machines— unblinking, unforgiving, measuring iambs with a ruler of code. So, what’s a poet to do but keep singing anyway? To light a match knowing the algorithm may call it arson? The reader may flinch, the checker cry "fraud," but somewhere, perhaps, in a heart not made of glass or gears, the flame might still be warm enough to burn A.I. and to prove you were here.