14th
the love of form is a love of endings
“She chooses knowledge over solace. In other words, you can have your faith; I prefer the turmoil of my unbelieving mind. Emily Dickinson did too. Death kept her intellect company. No ideas for either one of them without the acute consciousness of fatality. If poetry is knowledge, it is a forbidden one. These are not the kind of thoughts Mommy and Daddy are thinking as they sit in the parlor. The clearheaded are lonely. As for torments of self-doubt, could there be Art without it? Well, yes, surely, but not the kind that would have any meaning to Emily Dickinson and Louise Glück.
What she hungers for, as she tells us in her next book, The Seven Ages (2001), is not experience but understanding. All our lives we feel, but do not understand. Knowledge, she claims, may feed us, but it is bound to ravish us in the end.”
