Without discussing the merits or demerits of Fires, I would like to say that the
almost excessive expressionism of these poems still seems to me to be of a form
of natural and needed confession, a legitimate effort to portray the full complexity
and passion of an emotion. This tendency, persisting and reemerging at all times
in literature, in spite of wise puristic or classical restrictions, stubbornly,
maybe nightmarishly, tries to create an entirely poetic language, one in which each
word, loaded with maximum meaning, would reveal its hidden significance in the
way phosphorescences of stones are revealed under certain lights. The poet always
wants to put feelings or ideas in concrete forms, in forms that may become in
themselves precious (the very term is
revealing), like those gems that owe their density and sparkle to the almost unbearable
pressures and temperature they’ve been through.
—Marguerite Yourcenar, Fires
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981)
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