"genus irritable": Irritable

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Irritable

ir·ri·ta·ble

/ˈiritəbəl/

Adjective

Having or showing a tendency to be easily annoyed or made angry.
(of a bodily part or organ) Abnormally sensitive.

Synonyms

testy - tetchy - techy - irascible - petulant

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". . . That poets (using the word comprehensively, as including artists in general) are a genus irritable, is well understood. . . An artist is an artist only by dint of his exquisite sense of Beauty — a sense affording him rapturous enjoyment, but at the same time implying or involving, an equally exquisite sense of Deformity, of disproportion. Thus a wrong — an injustice — done a poet who is really a poet, excites him to a degree which, to ordinary apprehension, appears disproportionate with the wrong. Poets see injustice never where it does not exist — but very often where the unpoetical see no injustice whatever. Thus the poetical irritability has no reference to ‘temper’ in the vulgar sense, but merely to a more than usual clear-sightedness in respect to wrong: — this clear-sightedness being nothing more than a corollary from the vivid perceptions of right — of justice — of proportion. . . But one thing is clear — that the man who is not ‘irritable’ (to the ordinary apprehension), is no poet.” ~Edgar Allan Poe