Exquisite Spell

“‘Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it,’ Emily Dickinson said. One reason I like staying up to read long after everyone else has gone to sleep is that in the middle of the night not much conspires to break that spell. I like the dark hour when the secular world recedes and consciousness is loosened for poetic reverie. I have called the poem a soul in action through words because I want to suggest that lyric poetry provides us with a particular means of spiritual transport.”

— Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem, p. 250.