John Baker’s Blog

A taster:
If he had to date it, Richard pinpoints this Thursday as the day his marriage was finally over. Even though he and Mary Jo went through the form of apologizing, even though they had more than a few drinks and smoked a joint and had dislocated, impersonal sex, nothing got fixed. Mary Jo left [...]

TS Eliot was concerned that poetry attain what he called impersonality.
‘Tradition,’ he said, depended on the poet obtaining an historical sense, and:
this historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in [...]