Rarely do we offer declaratives on this Blog. They are generally simplistically misleading, empty, coercive or the like. They speak isolated from the contingencies and uncertainties of context.

May I diverge with a Saturday morning declaration: the emotional force of poetry is one-directional: poetry exerts its emotional force upward; and upward only. When spirits are high, poetry lifts them higher, and when they are low and sinking, poetry reverses the course, infusing our imaginations with a wonderment and marvel that rescue, restore and recover our spirits. When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, observed the Bard, I all alone be-weep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, And curse my fate…..but soon a lark will appear and sing hymns to heaven’s gates…we join with, and become one with, the Bard as we think of, remember, thy sweet love; and soon, stirred and inspired, calmed and ennobled, with that thought and memory, we scorn to change our state with kings.