☀ What Sparks Poetry: Aaron McCollough on How Poetry Makes Different Lives Shared Realities

“'The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly' is a public poem in a number of ways, even if it doesn’t make any grand (or correct) statements about our immediate political situation or about anything that very many people really know or care about. It is a poem about a private figure who became a public one only after his death and only by chance. A poem about a work of monumental public art and about trying to make sense of that. A poem about race and religion."

In a new book on one of W. H. Auden's most famous poems, author Ian Sansom argues that "September 1, 1939” is “a poem that still reverberates with meaning and controversy, a poem that readers return to at times of personal and national crisis."
via THE GUARDIAN