Running for Your Life: Art?

Critic Colin Burrow in a recent London Review of Books (No. 21, “The Magic Bloomschtick”) writes this and I couldn't agree more:

First, let’s start with poetry from Emily Dickinson:

The Poets light out Lamps –

Themselves – go out –

The Wicks them stimulate

If vital Light

Inhere as do the suns –

Each Age a Lens

Disseminating their

Circumference –

“(Dickinson) is doing what the best poets do, trying to think behind the words they’ve been given, whether those words come from a newspaper, from an essay, from a hubbub on the street, from a story told in church, or on their grandmother’s knee, from a whisper in the ear from the muse, or from another poem.”

Next: Running for Your Life: On Loving the Cold