I also gradually realized that all lyric poetry is directly or indirectly about mortality. The reason we feel the overwhelming force of a particular moment is that our lives are finite. One of the book's more remarkable qualities is the tranquillity and understatement of its poetic meditations. In a good poem there is no division between form and feeling. The form embodies the feeling just as the emotion animates the form.
Pure form is lifeless and abstract, pure emotion subjective and incoherent.
A madwoman screaming on a street corner has emotions enough for an epic, but she lacks the form to express her interior life clearly to anyone else. I believe that emotion is most keenly felt when it is partially held in check. A poem need not shout to be heard. As for the poems in The Gods of Winter , there was an additional private concern. I did not want my son remembered by uncontrolled howls of pain.