Sublime

say? I was once reading an interview with James Baldwin, and he described a frustration he had with Langston Hughes. He said when Hughes told you about a lynching, it was too realistic. That Hughes sounded like his daddy. Baldwin preferred Countee Cullen. He wanted the art, the suggestiveness, the distance to make it possible to digest horror.

It was as if words persisted when there were no humans around to hear them.

Lowell captured Dante’s appeal to readers—Belle included—with his dictum that the poet was “part of the soul’s resources in time of trouble.”

Of how his head continued to recite his poems of love even after it had been severed from his body, and how he picked up his speaking head, as casually as a modern-day motorcyclist might pick up his helmet, and walked up the steps into the Jama Masjid, and then, equally casually, went straight to heaven.