“‘I used to want to live / to avoid your elegy,’ Robert Lowell confessed in ‘For John Berryman.’

“The death of one poet is an extraordinary occasion for another poet. It is like the day a stonemason dies and another has to carve his headstone. Like a rough ashlar, the elegy sits waiting to be shaped into a memorial for the one who is gone. The death of a poet so great as Jack Gilbert last week pains, but also promises remembrances fitting the one who died.”

Read more of Casey N. Cep on poets mourning poets here.

10:35 am  •  19 November 2012  •  68 notes