Sublime

Her public reputation, like Demeter’s daughter, crawls back up from the underworld.

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 main trouble with poets,” he said, “is that so few of them ever write a poem worth reading. Men of perfectly sound mind in their letters, who express themselves in eloquent, red-blooded prose, become mincing fools when they turn to verse. Their poems either descant in purple epithets upon the joys of spring, or salivate over a glimpse of some

precocious.

Jeff was a tender soul. I think he thought that country—if there was one—was just blossoming with roses and babies and canaries and tidies, and all that sort of thing.

Tillie Olsen.