what was really going on at the level of prosody was not a presentation of the image as a picture but an analysis of the constitutive elements of the image as it is being presented

you can actually watch, as the words are laid down on the page, the process from which the perception of the thing gets born into its numinous quality as a word

This is peroration, a way of saying that reading Immanuel Kant led me to wonder if his essay embodies what reason brings to the idea of perpetual peace

It requires an emendation

that the grand struggle for existence is a dream, a meaningless bubble in the meaningless weirs of the evolution of matter

that raffish play with eloquence

The Woman Warrior’s tendentiousness is feminist

It's more demotic than "Sleep", more spontaneous and tougher

what a long poem needs is a prosody that will carry it when the writing isn’t especially brilliant

the tacitly prurient masks behind which European ethnography expressed its fascination with the bodies of the people they were exploiting or hoped to exploit