I’d like to ask you a question, if I may.”“What?”“All these poems you’ve written and hidden—so many poems. Why?”While she thought, morning broke and the birds sang in the garden. “Because I could not stop.

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become. Emily Dickinson barely left her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, but when we read 'My life stood -- a loaded gun' we know we have met an imagination that will detonate life, not decorate it.

The spreading wide my narrow Hands To gather Paradise.

That Love is all there isIs all we know of Love,It is enough, the freight should beProportioned to the groove.

All she needs is to lay down a few sentences, sometimes just a few words, on paper to feel soothed, for a moment delivered from this nameless, pointless urgency that consumes her. Even saved. What is the catastrophe from which she tries to rip these lines? Oblivion, death, the inferno of the world? She couldn't say.

Emily écrit sur le monde qu'elle habite, tout en sachant qu'il serait plus beau si personne ne l'habitait.

Bennett advises his daughter not to develop a passion for poetry because it is ‘dangerous to a woman’: like novels, poetry heightens a woman’s ‘natural sensibility to an extravagant degree’ and ‘inspires a ‘romantic turn of the mind,’ that is ‘utterly inconsistent with the solid duties and priorities of life.

I tell the truth,' she said. 'But I tell it slant.

I know that I myself have felt that prickling of the scalp that Emily Dickinson tells us is the sign of recognition before a true poem.

There are depths in every Consciousness, from which we cannot rescue ourselves - to which none can go with us.