Poet and translator George Szirtes said this:

“It is not the catharsis but the grace. The grace of the writing is the triumph of the imagination….”

So much poetry these days is lacking in gracefulness. I like to think of a poem as a sort of language ballet, a lithe duration of supple and subtle written gestures. Overture, theme, digression, return, apotheosis. But wouldn’t an insistence on gracefulness limit a poet’s compositional repertoire, her expressive discretion? Yes, and the sooner the better! Poetry is an aesthetic medium. It’s high time it got back to the Orphic mysteries, to a contemplative wrestling with the dark angel of hope and beauty (that elusive symbol of meaning).

Stravinsky wrote music for a graceful ballet – The Firebird.

The story of The Firebird is about Prince Ivan and his complex struggle with Kashchei the Immortal. Inside Kashchei’s magical kingdom, the prince falls in…

Poetry of the highest quality almost never appears. When it does, we want to honor it with the deepest words from our startled minds. At such times, it’s so easy to slip into hyperbole. How to use language to speak about the finest language? To prevent adjectival deluge, the dictionary should be allowed to shrink, leaving three options, three markers: “mysterious,” “visionary,” “beautiful.”

Another way of speaking about the finest poems is to describe what they’re not. Having tried to write poems myself, I know the distance between an attempt at written art and the elusiveness of its realization.  I know when I’ve encountered lines by another that are beyond the creative resources of my consciousness, lines exceeding whatever poetic talent I possess. Master poems are not ostensible poems.

Poetry of the highest quality is other than what you find when you look for poems to read these days…