Don’t send a poet to London.

Taken at face value, the line reads like a sardonic warning: London—standing for a great commercial, political, and social metropolis—can be inhospitable to the sensibility and independence associated with poets. In Heine’s idiom, it suggests that a poet may be ill-suited to environments dominated by money, bureaucracy, and public opinion, where imagination and irony are dulled or forced into conformity. More broadly, it fits Heine’s recurring tension between art and modern urban life: the poet as a figure who sees too sharply, feels too much, and therefore suffers when placed in a world that rewards practicality over lyric truth.