Stanley Kunitz said,
“The poem is not just language, it is itself an incarnation. The poem is more alive than anything except the body itself, and it’s less perishable., one hopes, than the body.
When I’m reading Hopkins aloud, I feel I am actually occupying his selfhood and speaking out of it, not simply reciting the words, but somehow merging into his bloodstream and nervous stem.
We forget that the human spirit is poured into the art form, and becomes the electric centre of that spirit among future populations. You can pick up a poem by Keats or Coleridge and sense the living vibration in the poem. That vibration cannot be removed from the poem. It’s a remarkable thing, absolutely remarkable. Every time we read a poem from the past we resurrect the poet.”
p. 100, The Wild Braid.
P.S. Katra is Vulcan