James Merrill. “No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today’s / Dusk room aglow / For the last time / With candlelight. / Faces love lit, / Gifts underfoot. / Still to be so poised, so / Receptive. Still to recall, to praise.”
Jalen Hurts wouldn't allow himself to climb Philadelphia's famous "Rocky steps" until he won the Super Bowl. This was a powerful motivator, as he was dying to see Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even at the world-class Philadelphia Museum of Art.
@TheLuisPanini I think I started with Northanger Abbey, because it was her first completed novel (though published later). But I’m sure you can’t go wrong!
“Solitary music teachers, themselves bred on toil, leading the young by way of pain and discipline to their own honorable impasse, teaching in that way the scales of disappointment.”
-Elizabeth Hardwick, SLEEPLESS NIGHTS
Schuyler's elegy for O'Hara, and one of the most beautiful poems I know: "new needles / on the spruce, new seaweed / on the low-tide rocks / other grass and other water / even the great gold lichen / on a granite boulder / even the boulder quite / literally is not the same"