What is a saint? A saint is a hobo, grabbed by the scruff & assigned a spiritual job to do. What is a poet? Part of the scribbler cadre of this bunch.

Hart Crane on hobos (in The Bridge) : "humpty-dumpty clods"... "they touch something like a key, perhaps". Aside from the probable homosexual joke there, he's also talking about the hobos' nostalgia or connectedness with Mother Earth.

Herodotus recounts the blunt advice of an advisor to Persian king Cyrus, about how to subdue a certain tribe - tell the fathers to become shopkeepers, & the sons to learn the flute & the harp, rather than war - you will make them all effeminate & easy to control. So aggression is gendered down through the centuries.

But poet & saint cannot be subjugated so easily... they have a connection with the original Gardener (Adam), by way of guilt-ridden Cain (the farmer) & guileless Abel (the shepherd). Farmer, gardener... their quiet productive labor in the earth, far from the hot winds of vain cities... the peacemaker, the good shepherd... Milton's muse...

The hobo-poet-saint is not exactly an epicurean Bohemian, a Beat... but there is some affinity in their common desire to negate the harsh & violent labors of the Iron Age... they share the same alienation, but the hobo-saint turns that diffidence into a motivated spiritual labor of another kind... like that of the gardener...

The hobo-poet-saint feels a certain distaste for the profession of letters, since there all the Iron Age labor & vanity enters in again, by the back door... his Arcadia is an evening (after work) of literary "amateurs", slouched in some cafe... nobody pays them for their perfect freedom...

but the hobo-poet-saint must pursue those games with a fiery devotion... blind Miltons all, Chaucers, Shakespeares, chanting the Garden of Eden coming back... the Jubilee... & how to get there... an isolato-farmer's wisdom...

A Nation gets the poets it deserves... some nations turn it all dutifully into trade & busy-ness...