The trouble with the interpreter is that he is too intelligent. He understands what the artist wants to say and even saves him the trouble of saying it—or at least of saying it in as pointed and polished a way as it could be said.
For it seems to me that, if the poet were left to himself, and not prematurely flattered by a few prigs, who happen to comprehend him before he is quite comprehensible, he might have worked in a harder and humbler fashion, until he had made his whole image really comprehensible and complete.
The poet's friends are so fantastically vain of having understood it when it was unfinished, that they rush about boasting of their understanding, that they may get the glory of it before other people can understand.
I do think it would be better if some really original poets of today went on pegging away, until their best effects were more like notes on a musical instrument and less like notes in a notebook.
—G. K. Chesterton, “The Middleman in Poetry”
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