the writer's goal

I hate analyzing. Analyzing writing, especially poetry, is something that really, really irks me. It's like dissection to me. Making incisions in a dead body that used to be inhabited by a living thing has always been cruel. It's horrific. Analyzing a poem is not so harsh, but it seems like one is sucking the life out of it for "intellectual" purposes.

I am wary of intellectualism. Too often, it seems, it approaches things as though the world were objective: as though we were merely scientific, functional things, instead of spiritual beings. Objectivity? I plead for your passion instead. Exclamations or silences or - my preference: just a moment - about the beauty of something like "evening full of the linnet's wings".

One does not analyze the sunset sky; one looks at it and is filled with beauty. I think that that is the writer's goal: not to be put on a pedestal or inside a glass case for bespectacled academics to poke and prod at like a poor butterfly pinned by its wings - but rather, for the words to be still alive throughout the ages, seen and beauty-inspiring; to inspire the wisdom of the future, recall that of the past, and capture in elegance or candor that truth of the present time. That is my goal, at least.