No matter how loyal and unswerving one’s personal and public commitments—to a love partner, a country, an idea—part of our interior remains capable of change. It is this part of our interior—this region of reversibility that is like a sheet of spun fabric one nanometer thick—that literature addresses. Far from being a threat to our commitments, this interior silk fabric that makes us labile and open enables us actively to re-consent each day to the people and places we are ever more deeply committed to. It also makes us open to new commitments. All genres of literature address this part of us: that is why anti-theatrical tracts are so frightened of the theatre; that is why it is impossible to predict which fictional person any one of us will identify with when reading Antony and Cleopatra or Wuthering Heights. Elaine Scarry on how poetry has made the world a safer, kinder place
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No matter how loyal and unswerving one’s personal and public commitments—to a love partner, a country, an idea—part of our interior remains capable of change. It is this part of our interior—this region of reversibility that is like a sheet of spun fabric one nanometer thick—that literature addresses. Far from being a threat to our commitments, this interior silk fabric that makes us labile and open enables us actively to re-consent each day to the people and places we are ever more deeply committed to. It also makes us open to new commitments. All genres of literature address this part of us: that is why anti-theatrical tracts are so frightened of the theatre; that is why it is impossible to predict which fictional person any one of us will identify with when reading Antony and Cleopatra or Wuthering Heights.

Elaine Scarry on how poetry has made the world a safer, kinder place

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    Poetry is life! Or rather memory of life.
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