Since good poetry (good writing, for that matter) transcends time, I liked this phrase of Molly Peacock, a Canadian poet, that ‘poetry exists against time’, together with the ‘indiscriminate gusto’ it permits her in traversing poetic landscapes near and far, across time and geography. Wishing you much indiscriminate gusto in your reading.

‘Because poetry exists against time, I can read with indiscriminate gusto poets of all countries and centuries.  Love and death, the great subjects of the lyric poem, manifest in all places and times.  Love, James Joyce says in Ulysses, is the “word known to all men”.’

See also the bestellar review of this luminous book, complete with a mosaic of quotations and metaphors.

Source: Molly Peacock, The Paper Garden: Mrs Delany Begins her Life’s Work at 72 (London: Bloomsbury, 2012 (2010)), p. 226