I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. It is analogous to the unseen for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. There is no moment in which their first home is felt to be the museum. It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished.
All earthly experience is partial.
Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power. Copyright 1994 by Louise Gl ck .