Poets who remain unrecognized have written on "Solitude" or even grim, sad things; and "Loneliness". So how does Love Live in our lives? It lives, somewhat, in poems as old as Alfred Tennyson's lines that still reverberate in minds, a deeply experienced Love-Sadness: "Break, break, break/On thy cold grey stones, O Sea /And I would that my tongue could utter/The thoughts that arise in me." Or, contrastingly, American modern poet Archibald MacLeish's highly quoted Timelessness of poetry, as essential to a good poem, in "Ars Poetica", which also sums up his argument: "A poem should be motionless in time/As the moon climbs./A poem should be equal to: /Not true./For all the history of grief/An empty doorway and a maple leaf./For love/The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea-A poem should not mean/But be." This book does not pretend to add to fancies that "become a rage" in modernist poems, then die a quiet death, no requiem read. These are poems that let you feel how Love Lives on in "Aloneness". Neither the sadness of an Emily Dickinson poem, nor the "solitude" of Wordsworth in "Daffodils", which seems all too personal, and difficult to identify with. Nor, even, the "solitude" of the unknown hill woman in "The Solitary Reaper". Why is a poem "Timeless", as expressed by MacLeish? "Motionless in time, as the moon climbs"? To understand and feel what he says, "A poem should not mean, but be" does not mean we open the doors of senselessness in abstract writing. It is something so deeply in contrast with Science; to comprehend what is "motionless in time, as the moon climbs." All the difference between what is Human and what is Artificial.
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