Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Great Regulars: Yet the poem's extraordinary force

doesn't merely depend on that drama of where and when it [Chidiock Tichborne's "Elegy"] was composed. In that time of religious passion in all its ugliness, those violent energies don't drive the poem, either. The energy of the poem comes from a certain way of thinking and writing: an explosive intensity of focus, the ability to illustrate a dire situation with a series of compact metaphors, repeating the idea of early death while varying it just enough with each new figure of speech to concentrate the momentum by another degree.

from Robert Pinsky: Slate: Poets Under Pressure

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