https://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/needs-poetry
“Emily Dickinson, that most exquisite poet of nineteenth century New England sensibility, once told a clergyman friend of hers that, “To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations.” It should be the chief occupation of the poet always to be startled.
In fact, less than a century later, the poet Cesare Pavese, made the same point in his own Italian way. “Poetry, that is, the cosmic dignity of the particular,” he began, “is born from the moments in which we lift up our heads and discover—with stupor—life!” It is the sheer thisness of the thing—the thing that in the very brightness of its being really does exist—that the poet is moved to celebrate. His lyric excitement may erupt into language so lovely that it succeeds even in enrapturing the readers of it. A thing so full of the energy of being is certain to survive triumphant all the nothingness that surrounds and threatens it.
Chesterton, in one of his poems, repeats the phrase “vile dust,” and so rising majestically to rebuke the grim-faced preacher who spoke the words, whose denigration of our dust G.K. will not abide, imagines the planet itself in protest, summoning the dead stone that lived beneath his feet to confront and confound the naysayer:
Come down out of your dusty shrine
The living dust to see,
The flowers that at your sermon’s end
Stand blazing silently.”
How my heart sings 