Poetry moves me, possibly too much. As a teenager, I memorized the poems I loved most, and by 28 I had “MORE POETRY!!!” (exclamation points included) tattooed on my left forearm. There are still poems today that I can’t hear a line of without whispering the couplet’s end.
One could simply psychologize this sentiment—and not entirely without merit. I often associate poems with places or people from my youth whom I have loved or whom I miss. Sometimes, the private and personal world of a poet resonates with our private and personal stories as a kind of parallel pathos. And yet under this theory of poetry, whatever sublimity is suggested by, say, the rose garden in Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” or the port in Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” might be regarded as just an emotional response, as consonant imagery or careful craft.
