But poets have always celebrated grief as one of the strongest human emotions, one of our signature feelings.
Implicit in poetry is the notion that we are deepened by heartbreaks, by the recognition and understanding of suffering -- not just our own suffering but also the suffering of others. We are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish, or to let others vanish, without leaving a verbal record. The poet is one who will not be reconciled, who is determined to leave a trace in words, to transform oceanic depths of feeling into the faithful nuances of art.
Poetry companions us. Poems are written in solitude, but they reach out to others, which makes poetry a social act. It rises out of one solitude to meet another. Poems of terrible sadness and loss trouble and challenge us, but they also make us feel less alone and more connected. Our own desolations become more recognizable to use, more articulate, something shared. We become less isolated in our sorrow, and thus are befriended by the words of another. There is something ennobling in grief that is compacted, expressed, and transfigured into poetry.
Edward Hirsch, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), xv-xvi.
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