necessary condition

If I was to be the ‘common reader’, I had a lot of reading to do.

deep song

It is rightly called “deep” song, he tells us, because it is “deeper than all the wells and all the seas that surround the world, much deeper than the present heart that creates it and the voice that sings it, because it is almost infinite. It comes from distant races, crossing the cemetery of the years…” Beneath the verses a question throbs, he says, a terrible question without an answer. Life is seen through an impenetrable veil, as if through the eyes of an ancient sibyl or an Andalusian sphinx.

—Edward F. Stanton (quoting Federico Garcia Lorca), Tragic Myth: Lorca and Cante Jondo (Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1978)

born blind

A young poet often can’t see clichés: One must be well-read to recognize well-worn words.