only young poets and old whores can appreciate

A poet can endure anything. Which amounts to saying that a human being can endure anything. Except that it's not true: there are obviously limits to what a human being can endure. Really endure. A poet, on the other hand, can endure anything. We grew up with this conviction. The opening assertion is true, but that way lie ruin, madness, and death.

[...] it has to be said that he wrote badly [...] He wanted to be a poet, and threw himself into this endeavour with all his energy and willpower. He was tenacious in a blind ,uncritical way, like the bad guys in westerns, falling like flies but persevering, determined to take the hero's bullets, and in the end there was something likable about this tenacity; it give him an aura, a kind of literary sanctity that only young poets and old whores can appreciate.