Keatsian inspiration

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I’m not a Romantic, but I want to better appreciate the importance for poetry that Romanticism was. More important to me, though, is to gain a sense of poetics that’s fair to a sense of textual intimacy that I want to develop. Keatsian inspiration helps.

“Every piece of writing was like a pond...”

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I wish I understood more about poetics as it’s been traditionally pursued.
I came across a discussion of William Empson that’s enchanting.

I’m not Sartre’s son.

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Before I saw you Sunday, a rainy night, I’d been at the bookstore—a long time. I won’t list all the ones I wanted to buy—too many. I have little time for even a few soon. It’s always like that! I can’t stand it. 24, I wanted for my library. I bought 6. Even 6 is too much. Maybe they’ll be inhabited within the year—after others, bought long ago, are read, having been carefully selected from many times more than those, bought way back. Or maybe the new 6 points in my pointillism of textual affairs shifts the whole sequence. (Spread them all on a floor, so the reading sequence becomes a broken line from book to book to book, maybe forming a pattern, as if a path itself is a message.)

soothing W. H. Auden

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We’ve evolved well, W.H. We’re postmoderns now!

“I can think farther than that but I forget”

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That’s the fifth line of Merwin’s “The Nomad Flute” (continuing from my previous posting, last month).

In this stage of my life, I have an inner-directed sense of living well, not very decorative—a good sense of thriving, I feel, but unattached to its materiality (or lack of it). I'm not an imagist.