Sublime

Edith Sitwell

Years ago, I wrote an article called “Poetry, Pleasure, and the Hedonist Reader” in which I enumerated five or six of the principle pleasures of poetry. One of the final pleasures, for instance, is the pleasure of meaning—the moment when a poem’s emotional effect begins to crystallize into significance you can articulate. But the very final

Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection.

William Maxwell says it somewhere in The Folded Leaf: that the teenager gets so brooding in his sexuality and self-sanctity that all he requires of others is their absence.

The Trouble I’ve Seen,