Bokelskere.no

We all carry about with us the histories, shorter or longer, of our shadows. Poetry is not, cannot be therapy, but in a time when all spirituality is tainted by political exploitation, or by the depraved cultural politics of the academy and the media, a few poets can remind us of the possibility of a more authentic spirituality.

There is loss as well as gain in forsaking the antithetical stance against nature. Poetry may relax too much and appear to come too easily if you abandon yourself to phrasal waves and ride with them.

In old age, time becomes urgent, and this makes me unwilling to tolerate learned ignorance.

Authenticity in culture involves an augmenting of the foundations, according to Hannah Arendt in "Between Past and Future (1961).

You can reread, teach, and write about Shakespeare all your life and never get beyond finding him an enigma.

How is it that Shakespeare, who had no designs upon us, surpasses any other writer - even Dante, Cervantes, and Tolstoy - in revealing the full burden of our mortality? The least tendentious of dramatists, he nevertheless teaches us the reality of our lives and the necessity of confronting our common limitations as humans. I say "teaches" but the use of this word is misleading since Shakespeare, so far as we can tell, has no desire to instruct us.

...confront only the writers who are capable of giving you a sense of something ever more about to be.