Let us also take a look at the work of an American poet, Ethridge Knight. In his poem, “The Warden Said to Me,” he is asked why the Black prisoners do not run off, and he answers, “Well, suh, / I ain’t for sure, but I reckon it’s cause / We ain’t got no wheres to run to.” For Knight, this sense of displacement and being shut out becomes the essence of his poetics much like Clare’s and Dante’s. Here is “Prison Graveyard”:^[2]

Though seemingly walled in, deprived of a future, the west of the setting sun, though deprived of their hymns, their poetry, the spirits nonetheless transcend their lot through an association with the forces of darkness which, in the poem’s context, become forces of light and freedom. And the poem’s strategy, by resorting to what used to be called the via negativa, the negative way, is to list the very things it does not have, that it desires, and so, at least in terms of the poem, to possess them, to possess their words.

In these four poets, we have four basic predicaments of the outsider: the political and personal exile of Dante; the social and poetic exclusion of Clare; the racial repression of Knight; the political censorship faced by Dimitrova. And we also have four paradigmatic techniques for writing in the margins: Dante’s satiric dismissal of the center and inward journey to his own marginal paradise; Clare’s creation of secure nests for his imagination; Knight’s imaginative appropriation of the lost world; Dimitrova’s redefinition of poetic language and image. These four situations and the solutions the poets find for them are essential for understanding a possible role of the poet in our world today. We can further understand the vision of the periphery by examining how other poets in various times and places have both found themselves in and have established peripheral positions and how they have dealt with them.

For Blake, the essential stance of the poet is also that of the prophet — an outsider, an observer marginalized by the forces around him, a writer on the periphery, a Jeremiah or a Daniel.

One of the most obvious choices is the great Romantic poet, William Blake.^[3] “I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another man’s,” he writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. For Blake, the essential stance of the poet is also that of the prophet — an outsider, an observer marginalized by the forces around him, a writer on the periphery, a Jeremiah or a Daniel. So it is no surprise that we find him in this book “walking among the fires of hell” or dining with Isaiah and Ezekiel, satirizing the rest of mankind for not living up to its potential, for confining itself to the five senses rather than using the imagination. Blake sets himself apart from society, though he does so in a vision that is always dialectic, always questioning itself. “Without Contraries is no progression,” he says early on. And yet for Blake, the contraries are themselves always being deconstructed: heaven and hell are the opposite of what we imagine them to be, but Blake’s aim is not to destroy one at the expense of the other, rather to see each as necessary for the other, and to have their relationships constantly shifting or progressing. Along the way, he champions the power of the individual: “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression,” he writes. Such a dialectic play of contraries is meant to fight against a rigid world view, against a rigid ethics that does not question itself, against the “mind forg’d manacles” he criticizes in “London.” “Expect poison from standing water” he says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”