And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like.
I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.
It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.
Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
When we have a favorite writer, it's always the places where they grew up, lived, worked, and that they recreated on the page that we most want to visit and commune with. Faulkner's Mississippi, Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, etc. The mind of the reader longs to be somewhere, not just anywhere, and certainly not nowhere.
The most valuable writers are those in whom we find not themselves, or ourselves, or the fugitive era of their lifetimes, but the common vision of all times.
There is an extraordinary degree of amity among Washington poets. They hang together. You would be hard pressed to find that in Manhattan.
I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.
However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.
The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.