Having lived with anger and having tried to live without it, I discovered that living with it was more honest. Both anger and its offspring, rage, have received a rather poor press in America. Because they are emotions which violate the reflective temperament we are brought up to believe is the aim of education and maturity, they make us uncomfortable. Psychoanalysts and media gurus alike urge us to make emotion work for us, while anger is looked upon as a kind of spiritual plumber hired to fix a leaking faucet. Once the leak has been fixed, one either gets rid of him or else agrees to pay him overtime.
Anger is an acceptable emotion only when it leads to a certain spiritual passivity.
An illegitimate emotion can be made legitimate by transforming it into something good and wholesome. But the evidence of those bad poems tells me that something else was at work when I was nineteen. I looked upon anger then as an emotion that would lift me up because it would allow me to explode against my fate. Anger fed my passion to survive as I thought one was expected to survive, which is what made it a messy, unkempt, and uncontrollable emotion. Yet messy as it was, it was the emotion that helped me get through the most difficult time in my life.