...the works of astronomers who never looked at stars. I mean that they were writing about poetry as if poetry were a task, and not what it really is: a passion and a joy." Borges simply and beautifully identifies the problem with many critical studies, commentaries and textbooks: that they do not do their job of pointing beyond themselves to the stars whose lights they are supposedly guided by and whose movements they are meant to chart. As such, they become self-enclosed worlds--means mistaking themselves for ends.

Such works, especially if encountered prematurely (by teenagers, for example), often distort and strangle the life out of the poetry and, therefore, put potential readers of poetry off for years. Whitman went to the heart of the problem in Leaves of Grass: "Have you felt so proud to get at the meanings of poems?" he pointedly asked, and declared: "Stop this day and night and you shall possess the origin of all poems." Eschewing the rationalist reduction of poetry to a paraphrasable "meaning", Whitman's urgent cry to "stop this day and...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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