Friday, March 16, 2012

Poets on the Edge

In the work of every great poet there is something the poet glimpses only partly, a shape of which he or she has an only partial awareness, but which in fact is the deepest meaning of the work. I mean here the poet as voyant or vates. In this sense it follows, of course, that a prose writer like Kafka may also be called a great poet. And Heidegger? And Heidegger, Dickinson, Rimbaud, Kafka--each engaged the work I mean.