Wednesday, February 14, 2007

autobiographical poetry

One of my poetry teachers, Angela Ball, once said something to the effect that artists are the angel of themselves in their art. It makes me think that perhaps a good character-improvement program would be to act, think, and speak in verse. I think also of Thoreau's lines:

My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.

Thoreau, of course, both lived and wrote deliberately. Why would he make a seeming dichotomy between the lived and written life? Can someone help me?

I'm out of my depth, even in a pond.

1 Comments:

Blogger John Nelson said...

I suspect that Thoreau was being a little disingenuous; he both lived and uttered a lot. But he was intent on living, so some of his life was spent on that and not on writing. Like us. There's time for writing, but we use it in ways other than that--living in its many forms.

11:26 AM  

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