Amiri Baraka, New Jersey’s controversial one-time poet laureate, died yesterday, aged 79. The poet, essayist, and playwright’s body of work will be remembered, if at all, as among the least humane in the history of American letters. An early 9/11 denier—a notorious 2002 poem suggested Jews were responsible for the attacks—Baraka embraced many of the last century’s worst ideologies.

His rise to prominence is a lesson in the ways radical political commitment can disfigure talent—and mask its absence. And his many awards and honors—including prizes from the PEN/Faulkner, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller foundations—are a reminder of the damage wrought by a literary establishment willing to lower standards to accommodate fashion and ideology.