Sublime

The beauty of Basho’s prose, however, took the negative aspects of old age, loneliness, and death and imbued them with a serene sense of beauty.

His poems contain a luminous simplicity that expands until it pushes your ego out of the nest, and there you are, alone with Truth. In a Tranströmer poem, you inhabit space differently; a body becomes a thing, a mind floats, things have lives, and even non-things, even concepts, are alive.

Ruess was, in the words of Wallace Stegner, “a callow romantic, an adolescent esthete, an atavistic wanderer of the wastelands”:

dacoits,