Sublime

We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.

She would have liked a lotus, or China asters or the Japanese Iris, or meadow lilies—yes, she would have liked meadow lilies, because the very word meadow made her breathe more deeply, and either fling her arms or want to fling her arms, depending on who was by, rapturously up to whatever was watching in the sky. But dandelions were what she chiefl

The form of the protest—the bizarre blood sculpture, the poems—was itself a protest against passivity, lack of imagination, and normalcy.

Annie Allen had won Brooks the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950.

I understood immediately that certain things—attention, great energy, total concentration, tenderness, risk, beauty—were elements of poetry. And I understood that these elements did not grow as grass grows from a seed, naturally and unstoppably, but rather were somehow gathered and discovered by the poet, and placed inside the poem. —Mary Oliver