The word selah (Hebrew: ) — “to pause, reflect, and feel meaning” — appears almost seventy times in the poetry of the Psalms. Grief by its nature is poetical, elegiac. And poetry, like grief, is subversive, unbridled, and disobedient. Poetry violates linguistic norms because it must. Poetry helps us feel. And when we allow ourselves to feel that

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Through this “historical sense”, dead poets – and the traditions they represent – come alive again in the now and “assert their immortality”. Immortality, perhaps, but of a kind that must be granted. If we remember them, engage and argue with them, and modify their achievements to fit new purposes, those figures of the past will remain alive today.... See more