Susan Stewart Quotes

The most important American love poet in living memory, and certainly one of the most important American poets tout court, Robert Creeley was born in 1926 and raised in eastern Massachusetts.

The power of elegy, even in the face of an unbounded grief, to provide a containing form is vividly embodied by Anne Carson's 'Nox,' a nocturne with carefully controlled visual and tactile properties.

Umberto Poli was born in Trieste in 1883, when the city was at its zenith as the major port of the Habsburgs. The irredentist sympathies of Umberto's Italian-speaking parents can be detected in their giving him the first name of the Italian emperor.

Poets writing in English have long learned to mourn from classical precedents. They have drawn on a tradition of pastoral elegies, which incorporate the dead into the cycles of nature, that runs from Theocritus' Idylls to John Milton's 'Lycidas' and Percy Shelley's 'Adonais.'

More often writing soliloquies of suffering and consolation than collective songs like the dirge, elegists have discovered that lyric sequences can provide a powerful means of addressing the tensions between grief's inchoate emotion and social rituals of mourning.

In the Novel

He described her mouth as full of ashes.
So when he kissed her finally
he was thinking about ashes

and the blacker rim just below
the edge of the ashtray,
and the faint dark rim that outlined her lips,

and the lips themselves, at the limit
of another darkness, farther
and far more interior.

Then the way the red,
paling, just outside those lines
caught fire and the pages caught

soon after that. Slowly at first,
but then all at once
at the scalloped brown corners of each;

like the ruff of an offended and darkening bird,
extended, then folded
in on itself; multiple,

stiffening, gone.