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From the library I procured a book and started reading the poems. There was no reason to think I was going to enjoy them. I was not a particularly artistic kid, and I didn’t work on our high school literary magazine, or write. Nothing was auspicious. I do not remember opening the book. Yet to this …

From the library I procured a book and started reading the poems. There was no reason to think I was going to enjoy them. I was not a particularly artistic kid, and I didn’t work on our high school literary magazine, or write. Nothing was auspicious. I do not remember opening the book. Yet to this …

I have always been viscerally resistant to hitch up poetry to the wagon of utility. As John Keats wrote in a letter, “we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” Poetry seems to get worse the more it seems interested in lecturing and instructing us, usually about things that we already know…

John Ashbery writes in “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” that experiencing a poem is:

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

Ashbery’s po…

While these events were taking place in Saumur, Charles was making his fortune in the East Indies. His first trading venture, to begin with, had been very successful, and he had quickly realized a sum of six thousand dollars. Crossing the line cured him of many prejudices; he perceived that the bes…